Do you think that is possible? Because I only see the situation getting worse and worse from here.
What we should ask ourselves is, is a system where 10 people can own six times more than 3.1B compatible with the goal of solving poverty and granting a decent life standard to everyone?
Of course it’s possible. The material standard of living of the poorest people has consistently been making huge gains since the beginning of the industrial revolution and continues to do so, despite wealth inequality. This is backed up by every objective metric you can think of.
So even if everyone could live well because the amount of money siphoned away is not to much, there would still be some unfairness in the system that I would want to see go away.
And other than such projects the wealth of wealthy people are resources used wisely investing in production capabilities of products people want to buy, like new CPU generations or new warehouses etc. This is how most resources governed by the wealthy is allocated, which seems entirely reasonable, having a small fraction of that get lost to their personal whims seems like a very cheap price to pay for the efficiency of capitalism compared to other systems, we already pay like 40% in taxes, why not pay 1% or so tax to capitalism?
Last century, Something included unions, progressive taxation, and wealth redistribution, and that seemed to work for a while. Previous means were much bloodier.
But the issue is that every billionaire mansion creates real waste. Real plastic in the ocean. Real strip mines. Real greenhouse gasses. The land they occupy is land others cannot occupy.
And besides all that, they poison our discourse with media companies that are run at a loss and they lie to us with fake scientific studies.
Second, the amount of wealth is not fixed. Someone having more doesn't mean that others have less. I think many people don't understand where money comes from, lending to their fears of a large wealth gap.