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However, as many economists may observe - prominently the 2024 Nobel prize laureate, Daron Acemoglu, markets are only accretive to prosperity where they enable economic participation (where capital is widely distributed) and choice among the highest number of people. This is a tenant of advanced democracies and arguably why they become wealthy nations.
Unregulated markets, where capital becomes narrowly distributed, form a more extractive economy where firms can seek rents on their market positions. This is inherently minimizes the prosperity formed by supply and demand. Examples are, suppressing output, limiting innovation and limiting wages/ working conditions. Innovation in an extractive economy becomes undesirable as it undermines the capital holder's ability to extract rent from their market position. In pragmatic terms, these capital holders are the billionare's discussed. There is no socially useful reason for a wealth to be derived from suppressing wages, share buybacks or regulatory capture etc - all forms of wealth creation in an extractive economy rather than a participatory one.
And that's while completely skipping the issue of whether his wealth growth actually helps anything or inhibits the growth of other companies at this point.
> There isn't a finite amount of wealth
That's a weird way to phrase it and ignores how complex the world economy is. If you wanna prove this wrong, feel free to provide me $1T from the infinite wealth source.
However since the entrenchment of Amazon's market position, I would argue that the recent meaningful contribution to the overall wealth has been slight at best and creative destruction in their marketplace's has diminished. Amazon has increased shareholder value recently in ways that do not create, but transfer wealth. Share buybacks, layoffs etc. Creative destruction (i.e wealth creation) is iterative and requires open participation. I should be able to create a business along the value chain and experience competition from other businesses, equitable access to litigation, and benefit from my labor to freely make choices of my purchases and work place.
In in the most extractive economies, wealth is concentrated in capital to the point where no meaningful market activities occurs between capital and labor. The Confederate South for example - labor had zero value, no access to a legal system, and there was no resulting value chain development or internal consumer market. Nearly all wealth generated in such an economy came from the yield on capital, rather from wages. In today's modern economy an increasing share of the wealth comes from yield on capital relative to wages. Decreased competition of deployed capital results in an increase in unearned margin, thus higher yields. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA
An illustration I always share: Imagine how rich someone earning $1 million a year would be. Certainly rare, and would lead a lifestyle unrecognizable to most. $200k a year puts you solidly in the upper middle class in most of America. To earn a billion dollars, you would need to earn $1 million for a thousand years. For a techno-oligarch, that would be closer to 100+ thousand years. Therefore that level of wealth must only come from the tremendous yield on capital significant shares of the corporations afford. While it's great that people should create such successful companies and retain shares, the intensifying inequality faced in America more closely resembles a more extractive, oligopolistic economy. In these economies, value creation is passed over in favor of preserving the pathways of existing wealth and power entrenchment.
Here's a brief snippet of Acemoglu and Robinson's argument. https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2024/10/14/g-s1-28...
So having wealth overly concentrated means some have a disproportionate amount of control over resources that impact everyone.
Everytime someone or some organization is able to accumulate vast amounts of wealth relative to others, it’s indicative of some barrier to entry into the field that ideally we would ruthlessly innovate away.
If he meant “billionaires shouldn’t” exist as in “punish people for success” then that’s just dumb imo
Nice, but one time.
From a purely pro capitalistic view, you should treat the regular occurrence of billionaire creation(adjust this for inflation when a billion doesn’t sound big anymore) as a sign that you have market inefficiencies.
If you have a billion dollars from your business, why didn’t other players enter your market back when you were only making 10s of millions of dollars in profit?
You obviously have a profitable business, and other people like money too. Something in your market is preventing competition and if you want growth, which I have been told all around that we do want and this is why we adopted capitalism, then the market inefficiency should be identified and removed.
That may come in the form of taxation, but it may also come in the form of regulations that improve the market