For your first part, define "unfairly". A billionaire or multimillionaire might be benefitting from many advantages in life that others didn't get but this does not negate their capacity to organize capital and labor in a way that creates a business which otherwise wouldn't exist in the first place to give jobs to all those workers. This is not something just anyone or some collective of workers can pull out of a hat or easily continue to run in most situations. A single factory employee might work very hard but their marginal utility will make little difference to that company's survival. The CEO or founder simply ceasing work definitely could ruin the business as a whole though. So again, define unfair and why you have your definition.
Furthermore, Wealthy people in most developed modern economies didn't simply steal most of their wealth out of some giant pie that someone else created They instead organized capital and labor to create something others wanted to exchange value for. For this same reason again, I'd love to see you define how you measure "fair" and "unfair" share in a business or society.
As for the second part in italics, the idea that a middle class somehow can exist at all before a capitalist economy developed is absurd. Other parts of that quote are emotional dreck and as for said "plutocrats" being job creators, well, in many cases this is exactly what they are, whether you like it or not. This doesn't mean they're above criticism, but cheap, populist class warfare arguments are no good solution to anything economic or social.
You can tell it is unfair just by the outcome. It doesn't matter how clever you are or how hard you work, you are not personally creating 10,000 times as much value as the next bozo. You lucked into a good deal, and the only moral behavior is to spread the good luck around.
You cannot manage a big income without creating or supporting some number of jobs, so there is no virtue on it.
Even when they "lucked" into it, you have to think about the actual physical creation of that wealth and the fact that it cannot be created by one man.
Taking unclaimed gold sitting on the ground untouched by anyone is luck.
Taking 10 billion dollars sitting on the ground is not just luck. Other people had to create that wealth with their work and for you to own it means you are taking it from them.
10 billion dollars compared to the amount of work a human can output in his lifetime is obscene in scale. Anyone who owns that much money might as well have "taken" it from the ground as no amount of work from one man can justify that much wealth.
Yes. Besides blinding amounts of luck, billions also need a heavy admixture of coercion. Microsoft didn't just luck into its monopoly, it also maintained it through decades of strong-arm anti-competitive abuses. Amazon has driven tens of thousands of small, local businesses into the ground, and continues abusing its employees. It would be very easy for Amazon to treat its employees well, but it chooses not to. It would be somewhat less easy to root out counterfeit merchandise, but it instead participates in deceiving its customers. Is that luck? Hard work?
>As for the second part in italics, the idea that a middle class somehow can exist at all before a capitalist economy developed is absurd. Other parts of that quote are emotional dreck and as for said "plutocrats" being job creators, well, in many cases this is exactly what they are, whether you like it or not. This doesn't mean they're above criticism, but cheap, populist class warfare arguments are no good solution to anything economic or social.
It is emotional dreck, I'll give you that but that's not the important part of the quote and that's not why I posted it.
The important part of the quote is that the person saying it, is a plutocrat himself.
Furthermore, Wealthy people in most developed modern economies didn't simply steal most of their wealth out of some giant pie that someone else created They instead organized capital and labor to create something others wanted to exchange value for. For this same reason again, I'd love to see you define how you measure "fair" and "unfair" share in a business or society.
As for the second part in italics, the idea that a middle class somehow can exist at all before a capitalist economy developed is absurd. Other parts of that quote are emotional dreck and as for said "plutocrats" being job creators, well, in many cases this is exactly what they are, whether you like it or not. This doesn't mean they're above criticism, but cheap, populist class warfare arguments are no good solution to anything economic or social.