Tax these fuckers so they shut up
Good luck. And I'm not saying you're wrong or anything, just that it won't be easy. Look at what happened in Canada when they increased capital tax rate few weeks ago. It was a ton of articles and opinion pieces about how it will destroy the economy and innovation. You try taxing more in US and it will likely be an even harder push back given the larger ultra-high net worth population.
And I think there's also a point of culture. I think the startup culture and Silicon Valley culture is damaging the American economy, hyper focusing on short term results. What startup has been actually influential in recent times, in terms of a benefit to society? There's very few, and there's plenty of examples of these startups harming things.
Lastly, these billionaires are actually a security threat. They start to become so powerful, with so much money and power concentrated, that they can literally affect laws, policies, wars, and even elections. Trump won because of Robert Mercer, yet another libertarian extremist billionaire.
It helps to think of our current super-rich as an outcome of the asset bubble that currently exists in our economy, due to the fed’s post-2008 money printing; because it’s stock that accounts for most of their net worth.
So what happens if we tax away the majority of that wealth? It’s a huge amount - enough to have a marked effect on the economic system. Well, we get a lot more money spread around the system, but we didn’t get any more products, services, or value being created. What do we get? Inflation. We have the same amount of everything - it just costs more.
So the super rich end up being a place to park inflated dollars to keep them out of the real economy. They’re actually a useful deflationary mechanism.
I’d prefer if we would get out of this asset bubble and return to a “normal” economy but this is the situation we are in.
The super-rich whose net worth consists of large unrealised gains in stock are simply a product of this bad fiscal policy and are, believe it or not, helping, by acting as a buffer to absorb asset inflation. Remember that their wealth is imaginary - stock they can never sell in significant quantities - by forcing them to sell it and pumping the money back into the bottom half of the economy, what was previously imaginary money would now be real money flowing through the economy, causing the price of things consumers care about (i.e. not stocks) to go up.
The only solution is to fix the fiscal policy and stop printing money and running up deficits. Asset prices can return to normal levels and the super-rich’s net worth falls with them because it’s all stocks.
There’s nothing wild about this position, it’s just monetarism. If you expand the money supply without expanding the productive output of the economy, all you’ve done is make money worth less than it was before. The number of goods and services hasn’t changed, the cost to produce/import them hasn’t changed, demand hasn’t changed. You simply have slightly more money that represents a smaller fraction of the total money supply.
We would rather not throw all of our hopes and dreams at the feet of greedy capitalists who would sell their own grandma's walker for a powerball ticket.
ok, then improve it first instead of making it even more powerful, and therefore even harder to improve!