This Person Asked Whether “Billionaires Should Not Exist,” And People's Opinions Are So, Soooo Varied

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“The core idea behind the free market, the reason that we put our trust in it, is that it implicitly rewards more valuable, productive work over less valuable, less productive work. If I’m better at my job than you, or if my job otherwise produces more economic value than yours, the free market naturally causes me to earn more money than you. At least, that’s my impression of how people think about it and why they like and support it. If we try to apply that logic to billionaires, it just breaks. The free market has no sense of scale.”

“If the most talented, productive, savant of a person works for a wage and earns a million dollars each year, it’s really hard to explain how a billionaire could be so much more valuable to society that they’re sitting on more money than that savant would earn in one thousand years! A billion is a thousand million. There is just no possible way that someone has actually earned that much money by their contributions to society…”