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Comment by pwmglenn | Hacker News Reader

You can configure what you believe to be the correct price of essentials on the site. The defaults are BLS group average spending data.

    "There's nothing unjust about someone getting more returns on more invested, this will naturally lead to a widening wealth gap over time. It's an inherent property of existence that more invested yields more return yields yet more invested (accelerating)."

Do you see how there is nothing stopping insane accumulation of wealth/power? (assuming returns continue to accelerate in this manner?)

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There's nothing wrong with the accumulation of wealth. I fully agree that Citizens united (not capitalism) has created a distortion and corrupting force in the market place.

It's not the wealth that is evil/wrong/unjust/immoral. It's the use of it to corrupt power.

But there's evidence that just having that inequality (not an absolute amount of wealth, but vastly more wealth than normal people) does, indeed, distort human perception and mindset in a way that leads to...well, where we are today.

The problem is with wealth comes the power to change the rules to your advantage. This is already happening for instance the large difference between capital gains tax rates and earned income ones.

Wealth is power, you're too narrowly focusing on specific applications of this power (like your mention of Citizens United) but if that wasn't a thing there'd be innumerous other ways for wealth to be leveraged as power.

Power accumulation is inherently unjust and immoral, it corrupts, the utopic benevolent benefactor is extremely rare in real life because power accumulation begets power, those who have it do not want to lose it.

Also wealth accumulation is inherently unjust even in your framework of meritocracy, its accumulation and compounding nature is not meritocratic.

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