You can make millions and keep your empathy but I don't think you can be a billionaire unless you're just a voracious unsatiable machine without much empathy to begin with. You can get good at projecting a facade and saying the right things and maybe even actually doing some good in some cases but it's usually just in service of expanding your wealth or power.
This isn't really a bad thing, we just need to make sure that society sets the right incentives to align these individuals properly to maximize prosperity. (e.g, preventing monopolies so value is generated via innovation vs rent seeking)
I agree that you can reach a few million without becoming too evil. Hell, having a decent-paying desk job and putting a good chunk of money into VOO (or something equivalent) has historically been a relatively surefire way of doing that if you're willing to wait a few decades.
I honestly am not entirely convinced that billionaires should be allowed to exist, I kind of think we should start taxing like crazy when personal wealth gets above a certain number. If you're not happy with a billion dollars, you're not going to be happy with a trillion dollars, or a quadrillion, or a quintillion. I think after a certain amount of wealth, your interests aren't really aligned with what's good for society, because the only appeal at that point is seeing a number get bigger. It's not like you're "saving up for something" when you get to that much wealth.
They are provably good at allocating resources (assuming they are generating value via real innovation and not through monopoly/rent-seeking) so you want them doing that.
I'd just progressively tax all luxury goods at like 10,000% so that they are encouraged to continue to invest and build more companies rather than creating socially unproductive empires of empty houses and yachts.
> They are provably good at allocating resources (assuming they are generating value via real innovation and not through monopoly/rent-seeking) so you want them doing that.
I don't actually even agree with that. Microsoft, for example, seems to routinely overhire and then fire large percentages of their employees (edit, correction, said "corporations" before).
I think all they know how to do (I mean this pretty literally) is spend money. They are given money and then they spend that money. Sometimes spending that money leads to growth. Sometimes it leads to having to lay off 20% of the company. The important part is that the money is spent.
> I'd just progressively tax all luxury goods at like 10,000% so that they are encouraged to continue to invest and build more companies rather than creating socially unproductive empires of empty houses and yachts.
I'm not opposed to what you suggested but I'm not 100% sure how you'd define "luxury goods" with any kind of consistency.
The money is generally coming from value generation or value extraction (or rent-seeking). You can create societal incentives to encourage generation and discourage extraction. A patent-troll firm is maybe 90% parasitic to 10% productive. SpaceX is probably closer to the opposite (IMO). People are going to play the game to win but its up to society to decide what that means.
> The money is generally coming from value generation or value extraction.
This is the crux of the matter, a critical assumption. It breaks at many places.
One can make a boat load of money by predicting market movements slightly better. The value produced is not zero, but does not seem proportionate.
The size of the HFT market seems disproportionate to the value they purportedly produce by removing microsecond scale inefficiencies in the market. A bulk of the futures and options market is not from hedging but just gambling, it's not creating value, at least not in any proportionate sense.
This is vacuous as a followup to the original claim - which was that they're provably good at allocating resources to create value (the last part being implied).
"The system is good because it selects the ones who can create value" "No actually they don't create value" "Well, at least we know they're either creating value or destroying it" you see how that doesn't support the original claim at all
This isn't really a bad thing, we just need to make sure that society sets the right incentives to align these individuals properly to maximize prosperity. (e.g, preventing monopolies so value is generated via innovation vs rent seeking)