Reform capitalism or face revolution

Unless you're proposing we print money, it is a closed system. There is a relatively finite amount of money, growth, and consumption in any economy.

We've seen over the last 40 years that without concerted effort on the side of the working class, the owning class will keep and push wages low while keeping the gains of growth to themselves. It's well known that efficiency has increased while wages have barely grown.

No one is going to willingly share their profit with you, especially the lower you are in your income / skill level. That's why the average McDonalds employee in the US creates about $70,000/yr in profit and receives on average $18,000/yr.

Let's just put things in perspective. In the 10 years that the FAANG developer took to reach 400k income, some born-with-a-silver-spoon asset holding trust fund kid made more than $1 million a year, with lesser taxes than the FAANG holder.

The question is who was more productive? Why was the unproductive person taxed less for their income on that capital gains?

The real solution is to simply spend more money to elevate people out of poverty. But then the question everyone asks is "how will you pay for it?" and instead of answering with the correct answer ("deficit spending is not the original sin, the reason why we are deficit spending is the important question") most political candidates instead say they'll tax rich people.

It just so happens that reducing the amount of money and influence incredibly wealthy people have has its own benefits (less corruption and lobbying power for one), but revenue raising is not one of them.

It's a really interested look at planned economies taking into account the updates in computer technology.

It's also worth noting that while the Soviet Union wasn't perfect, for most of its history, income inequality was about 10-1 (extremely low), and inflation was virtually unheard of.

The richer you are, the higher the percentage your taxes went down. And that's a higher percentage on more income, too, so if you look at total dollars per income level it's much worse.

There are definitely benefits to rewarding creating new value, I'll grant that. The invisible hand of economics helps distribute value fairly between equals.

But often the rewards of value are monetary, and are captured by those who already have money and power because of past value creation, rather then distributed according to the contributions of all individuals who participated in work.

Power and money further distort the abilities of less fortunate individuals to gain just compensation for their efforts.

I see that as exploitative and problematic. I think it also arguably undermines new enterprises and new value that might have been created had the work that people were doing been rewarded in an equitable manner.

And it's not like this system of exploitation is new, so the wealth that has been accrued by families is itself suspect.

Furthermore, I don't believe that Jeff Bezos or any CEO has a claim to their billions. I agree that "billionaires are a policy failure" -- no one person has any right to that much wealth. Amazon's success is not solely attributable to Jeff Bezos, it was the work of thousands of employees and built upon publicly-funded technology research. That wealth should be distributed to society at large, not controlled by one man.

If you find yourself defending billionaires, I wonder, why? Do you think you will someday be a billionaire? If not, then billionaires are not your friend. Their money is money that is taken from your pocket, and the collective pockets of our society. The traditional argument for wealth inequality is "a rising tide lifts all boats", but that has been empirically false since the 70s -- despite a massive increase in wealth, most of it has gone to a very tiny portion of our population. And if you're not part of that population, what on earth do you have to gain from defending them?

Inequality is most socially acute within a given society, culture, or country. And inequality, poverty, and social precariousness have been escallating in the US and other generally more advanced countries.

Most global poverty alleviation has occurred in one country and one country only: China. The level of poverty alleviation is also based on an extreme measure -- dollars per day ($27/day is $10k/yr). Which, yes, makes a tremendous difference, but it's not as if we're talking about middle-class lifestyles.

There's a whole host of other issues with the "the world is a better place" story -- yes, there is some truth to it, but if that's the beginning and ending of your argument, you've left out one hell of a lot of salient points. Many of which are causing very real pain for people across the advanced world, as their reality falls far short of their expectations. That is the sort of thing which can become exceptionally destabilising socially and politically.

And has.