But at what point does marginal private incentive stop helping innovation and start damaging democracy? For sure risk-taking deserves reward but the size of the reward matters

The (mis-attributed to Lenin and Stalin) quote "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." is quite big in this. A little humility and a lot more tax-paying could save the trillionaire classes from the tumbrils but they lack the emotional intelligence to see it and as long as they make a few thousand millionaires below them they have useful idiots to decry any changes.

On the plus side, workers are in short supply. The future needs more people who can do things other than thinkers, and robots (bless their hearts) don't spend money as consumers so the other side of the billionaire equation demands new people to come into spending class: this means Africa, Asia and South America levelling up.

You can make your opponent's life a living hell with a hundred thousand and buy or figure out a way to frame extortion material from almost any decision maker with a million.

See how wars are being started tweeting from the toilet seat by a man who has never known anything but power to harm others.

See the many "formerly normal" people ending on a private island, doing horrendous things to children.

We tried to figure out examples of people with power who weren't corrupted by it, at least to some extent, and came up with very few.

It's a human trait we know very well, but do very little about.

1B actually seems good...congrats you've won capitalism but that's enough for one person

The ancient greek did not have this problem. Modern democracy does. And let's not even get into the issue of Putin-Trump being suspiciously a corrupt tandem team, just as Yuri predicted in the 1980s (!!!!!) already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9apDnRRSOCk

(Flood the zone with shit is based on an older KGB strategy, and the chinese had this under an even older stratagem name, though not necessarily based on information-overload; I'd call the KGB strategy primarily information-overload. The chinese stratagems are named a bit differently, e. g. holding the dagger under the cloak, or attack west while convincing the enemy you would attack east; sun tsu also built on the older chinese stratagems.)

I feel like we could have like a >95% income tax when you are worth more than like $20 million and it wouldnt actually matter too much to the people who would cap it out? Of course, its a 4000x decrease in wealth for some people, but at that level, when you're getting over 10 million, its basically infinite money anyway. There is no real gain from having 800 billion over having 20 million. What are you going to do with 800 billion dollars? Buy a thousand mega-mansions?

Discuss?

This seems very controversial to me. Why does increasing wealth eventually cause negative outcomes? What do you mean by “make it hard”?

This article skips over justifying its argument. I don’t think, for example, that someone should have come along to Warren Buffett in the late 80s and said: “Your company is too successful, you can’t be the full owner of it anymore”

Individual, founder-led companies are a good thing, especially if the companies are very successful. You’re more likely to force these companies into being led by investors and private equity if you don’t let the founders lead them.

Ironically, what produces billionaires quite reliably, is precisely the growing global middle class, which is now estimated to number around four billion. If 4 billion people can spend, say, 200 USD a month on various non-necessities, much of that enormous stream of cash will naturally flow to some big corporations producing universally demanded services and will make their main shareholders billionaires.

If Africa ever gets to the living standards of Asia, expect even more billionaires. Etc.

The right frame of comparison is not towards average Joe, but towards governments. Billionaires, for better or worse, are independent power sources, which IMO in grand scheme of things are useful.

I think the problem with modern world is not that some people have lots of money, but that we allowed money to buy pretty much everything else.