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I've been having some thoughts recently about the billionaires among us, some opinions, some takes even. My politics on this has evolved over time; at one point they were admirable titans of industry, then they were capitalist parasitic ticks, then they were a necessary part of the incentive structure that drives to economy, and now they are a bloated level of inefficiency preventing the market from functioning efficiently.
But over all this time, I've kinda synthesized a superstructure that I don't think is gonna change, that I think is not on the left right axis, but on another mysterious plane: I'm jealous of china. I think we're gonna have to steven universe meme one of these guys. I don't even really care who, and I don't care who does it. It could be Il Duce Trump, it could be General Secretary Mamdani, it could be some boring centrist whose name we don't know.
Anyone who imposes consequences on or limits the behaviors of the managing class would win my instant approval. This could just be because of my space autism getting triggered unimaginably by space-x getting fucking shackled to a corpse right before IPO/ Artemis being a big fucking waste of time and money* / Boeing doing boeing stuff, it could be the long 2008 hangover, it could be a thousand things.
I guess I'm just kinda over us deciding that once you reach a certain net worth, you are some sort of luminous being. You can go to pedo island and it's fine, you can do drugs that normies go to prison for an it's fine, you can fuck up critical national infrastructure and it's fine, you have infinite money when it's time to do what you want but somehow you have no money (or negative money!) when it's time to contribute to the public good.
I recall Luigi, and I recall the polling: people old enough to have been adults when a the post FDR wealth redistribution program was still around were very unfavorable; people who came into consciousness as the program was being fully unwound in the late 80s and 90s were split 50/50, and people who never experienced that social milieu were yelling "BASED BASED BASED!"
I really think that unless the uniparty plays it's cards right, the next realignment is not gonna be pretty for anyone. We need another FDR type to head that shit off like it's vanguardist communism in the 1930s, and at this point I don't think I care if they are left or right, they just need to be for the bottom and middle and even most of the top, and against the peak.
*Yes I know about pork. Pork can at least do something! highways can get build, parks are nice, and if we need to build bombs somewhere to it might as well be in bumfuck nowhere to give the nowhereians something to do other than meth.
I've updated my opinion of Elon considerably downward over the past few years. This isn't motivated reasoning or tribal updating, I think his early work genuinely represented some of the most impressive entrepreneurial achievement of the century, and I weighted that heavily for a long time. It's just that the account has been drawn down pretty substantially at this point.
SpaceX exists because Elon Musk willed it into existence through what can only be described as an unreasonable application of personal capital, obsession, and tolerance for failure. The prior probability of a private company successfully developing orbital rockets from scratch was, charitably, very low. He is not a steward of someone else's vision. He is the vision, or at least was its necessary precondition. You can believe the xAI merger is strategically stupid (I have no strong view either way) while still acknowledging that "guy makes questionable decisions about his own company" is a fairly weak indictment. The stronger criticism would need to be about the employees or shareholders who signed on under different assumptions, which is at least a real argument.
On billionaires more broadly, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of being genuinely more sympathetic to them than the median person in my reference class seems to be, to the point I'd have gone on that Pro-Billionaire March in SF if I was eligible and there, and I've spent some time trying to figure out whether this is motivated reasoning or just correct.
Here's the thing about capitalism that I think gets systematically underappreciated: it's one of the only wealth-generation mechanisms in human history that is even structurally capable of being positive-sum. The historical alternatives (conquest, extraction, inheritance, political rent-seeking) are zero or negative sum almost by definition. Someone taking your grain is not creating value; they are relocating it, while destroying some in the process.
Whereas Bezos building a logistics network that genuinely makes it cheaper and faster to get goods to people is, at minimum, attempting to create value, and by revealed preference it mostly succeeds. I'm simplifying, obviously. There are real extraction dynamics in modern capitalism. But the baseline isn't "billionaires take from the poor"; the baseline is "billionaires accumulate disproportionately while also expanding the total pie," which is a meaningfully different situation that calls for different policy responses.
The talent point is one people find uncomfortable to make explicitly, but I think it's basically right and the discomfort is doing a lot of work to obscure valid reasoning. The self-made billionaires specifically, the ones who started from, say, merely-upper-middle-class and compounded from there, represent a genuinely unusual combination of intelligence, risk tolerance, executive function, and social skill. You can find individual counterexamples, and luck is real and important, but as a population they seem to have a lot of the thing that makes economies grow. Artificially capping that seems like exactly the kind of policy that makes a satisfying fairness intuition and a mediocre growth outcome.
These people genuinely are *better" than you and me. Smarter, more driven, more ambitious, and more willing to take risks. All men are categorically not made equal.
("If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is not an entirely invalid argument)
I'll steelman the opposition: you could argue that beyond some threshold, wealth primarily compounds through rent-seeking rather than value creation, and that extreme concentration creates political capture that undermines the positive-sum game entirely. I think this is the correct version of the billionaire critique, and it's pretty different from "they are morally bad people who should be humbled."
The relationship between wealth and virtue is much weaker and in an opposite direction from what progressive discourse implies, and if you're selecting for "demonstrates poor impulse control, short time horizons, willingness to harm others for small personal gain," you will find that distribution pretty spread across income levels, possibly with some concerning concentrations nowhere near the top of the wealth distribution.
(If it's not obvious, this is not my stance on all billionaires. It doesn't extend to Russian oligarchs, tinpot dictators etc.)
This doesn't make sense to me. Maybe I'm not understanding what you mean but as far as I can figure there are two things which produce positive sum value:
Labor (I spend my labor to grow corn which adds value that didn't exist before)
Technology (I combine existing widgets in new ways to increase my labor productivity)
Capitalism and technology development might be synergistic but they aren't the same thing. If you take away the above two things then capitalism becomes just as zero-sum as any other system. Every market exchange is zero sum to within an epsilon. Every asset has its corresponding debt. Every privately owned object is a thing no one else can use. Etc.
No, I think what capitalism does excellently, better than any other system, is being an optimization algorithm for organizing the above two features. But an optimization algorithm needs an objective function, and I think the pro-capitalist crowd under-appreciates the possibility that this objective function can go off the rails, such that the thing capitalism is optimizing for is no longer "the common good".
Your taxonomy is missing capital investment, a pretty glaring omission. Sure, inventing steam engines is cool, but if no one builds any steam engines what good is the technology and labor? And no, you cannot reduce capital investment into frozen labor, it requires time preference, risk and organization. You can overcome these problems with systems other than allowing people to own property and freely enter into employment contracts but most other attempted systems have broadly done worse.
Capital investment (or deciding what and what not to invest in) is part of the optimization algorithm, which I already mentioned. The people who build the steam engines are the laborers, using machines.
Still, without labor or technology, any sort of of capital investment still doesn't do anything. You cannot obtain any non-zero-sum return on that investment without the labor or tech.
This is fair, and I think I might even agree, but doesn't really address my (admittedly narrow) point.
Without capital contribution in the list of positive sum sources you can't explain why a bunch of engineers dumped on a desert island with no tools will produce fewer automobiles than an identical cohort released inside a tesla factory. Building capital straightforwardly creates value in a positive sum manner. The relatively free market system we live under encouraged the behavior by allowing people to reap the fruits of capital investment through ownership, but the investment itself is what actually increases the sum. I need to be very explicit about this because the point in contention from the OP and in other threads is that people who direct this awesome positive sum mechanism are pure leeches who, because they can't actually grow the pie by your definition, are guilty in essence of stealing everything they have. It's the seeds of a very murderous and incorrect ideology.
"but for" isn't sufficient here, without the labor and capital the technology does nothing. without the labor and technology capital does very little. Without the Capital and technology you have dirt farmers barely surviving. You need all of it. Even Marx treated capital accumulation as the major engine of historical development, with technology being almost a special case of capital investment.
Sure I can. The factory is an artifact of prior people's value added labor and technology. In your view "Capital" would seem to be simply an accounting method for tracking the accumulated value-add of those two forces.
Oh no! Wrongthink!
Yeah, you're doing LTV. There are a lot of reasons LTV is wrong and your whole model doesn't really make any sense if you don't separate capital from labor. What exactly is technology except something design labor went into? So your taxonomy reduces to just "everything is labor" which is completely useless. If we accept that not all labor is equally useful then capitalist labor in pricing risk accurately entitles them to the fruits of that labor, capital gains.
All models are wrong, some models are useful. I'm simply explaining why I'm being a stickler for pointing out why your model is both wrong and anti-useful. If you don't care about my motivations then feel free to ignore it, it's not load bearing, but the empirical result of following your model is poverty and body bags
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