To me, the ruling class is the Ivy League graduate class. They run and rule this country to their benefit.
The Billionaires have fabulous lives, sure, but I don't think they have much political power at all.
If anything, I see them as one of the few counterweights to the real political power.
The US literally just elected a billionaire with no prior political experience to the Presidency four years ago!
Of course they have some political power.
Why not? People voluntarily gave him and his company this money, voluntarily invested in Amazon. What gives you the right to try and take it from him? "Envy makes right" is not the basis for a very good moral system.
A). The parent doesn't claim morality as the foundation. B). Thriving in a capitalist system is also not a foundation for morality. C). There are no underlying structures that dictate/require the sum total of individual actions have to correspond to societal good (not that i'm aware of). This would be akin to claiming that drug dealers have moral superiority.
What we have here is a version of the tragedy of the commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#:~:text...). Something that benefits the individual on the short term while negatively impacting large swaths of connected infrastructure. In a society where money == votes I can't seen how that's a valid and functioning path forward.
Currently, extremely wealthy people get tax breaks for contributing to "charity". The majority do so by creating a Foundation of their own to invest in the charitable causes that they prefer.
However, taxation goes to where the community has decided is needed, hopefully through a form of representative government.
We should not have to rely on Bill Gates deciding to invest in vaccine research to ensure that it occurs. Some of his wealth, now accumulated, should be returning to the common-wealth via taxation.
This ensures that wealth does not accumulate within very small groups of people to the extent that the rest of society does not also share that wealth.
In short, Ayn Rand was wrong.