So, this bullshit about megarich is just that.
Check out this list of the Top Richest People in the World.They ALL made their money by their own ideas.
or successfully stole new ideas, same diff Most are First Generation.
This whole "Let's blame it all on those rich people, because they're not me" is not new.
Elon Musk is the same as Thomas Edison. Maybe stop blaming the rich pioneers for all our problems?
To explain this symbolically, we're blaming the few people at the very top of the ladder, rather than the more despicable folks a few rungs down.
I find it quite interesting that people want to blame the MegaRich. Why not blame the Sorta Rich?
Did you know that most politicians are the children of prominent business owners?
It isn't Elon Musks you should be complaining about. It's the Barack Obamas and Donald Trumps you should be pissed at.
If you were born poor, you can become rich. But if you were born poor, you CAN'T succeed in politics. It takes one lifetime to get the wealth, and a whole other lifetime to use that wealth to enter into politics in any meaningful way.
The problem of capital accumulation in a rapacious economy is beyond personalities. It's the entire structure which permits this to happen which needs correction; if tomorrow Bezos and Musk died or gave away all of their wealth, what would change? Many of these capital consolidations do not even belong to a person, like assets to Blackrock, or media to Disney, or infotech to Google. Imo this introduces multiple problems.
When all of US media is controlled by 4 companies and social media by 3 companies, it's self-evident this is a problem. A living room full of people set the limits of national discourse. But this is not the only problem; money talks louder than media.
12,000 lobbyists with $3.77B between them work around the clock to pervert the course of politics, such that even if you were to vote in some radical outsider or bog standard politician like Trump vs Biden, there won't be any actual change to the status quo. Given that the status quo has been engineered to benefit wealth consolidated around a small number of people and entities, they will spend considerable sums of money to ensure that their candidates win, and that their candidates serve their interests before the interests of the people.
A look a the top spenders is telling. Is it any surprise that lawmakers will
reward bankers for destroying the economy or
disregard pharmaceutical companies for waging an opium war against the populace.
There are many megacorps and individuals who are collectively responsible for human misery on a scale the mind cannot comprehend, but that is besides the point. The fact that these entities and persons are willing to enslave people around the world, short change workers, get them drugged up and set the world aflame is also besides the point. The point is that this level of wealth consolidation is a danger to democracy, because it outcompetes the people when it comes to getting loyal public servants elected or employed. There is no point in having a democratic government if all of your elected officials and unelected officials are riding a merry go round between office and corporate desk. For all the problems you have, not a single one which affects the interests of consolidated capital can be resolved until the malign influence it has over politics is excised.
The sort of rich just don't introduce these kinds of problems because it's all a matter of scale. Someone who owns three houses is not a threat to democracy or an unaccomodatable influence on the local housing market compared to a hedge fund that bought up 30,000 homes in your town and is jacking the prices up. Barack Obamas and Trumps come and go, but the interests of consolidated capital remain constant. It is ever the great American tradition to break up monopolies - and it is a tradition which should be enjoyed once more if the American people are to actually enjoy the fruits of their labour, rather than see it all skimmed off to become dead money elsewhere.
Let's compare Elon Musk to some hypothetical industrious genius born at the same time as him. This hypothetical man is a real da vinci, good at everything he does, and hard working and humble to boot. Only problem is - he is African American and poor. Elon Musk is born into wealth and has emeralds slipping out of his pockets, so he never has to actually lift up a finger to labour, nevertheless he manages to acquire other people's properties and become successful. Now the banks love Elon, because he's got plenty of assets and is a low risk borrower. So when he wants to go to the grocery store and buy twitter or a new superyacht, instead of taking it out of his debit account, he borrows cheaply. The bank lets him borrow great sums cheaply because he owns lots of valuable assets he can sell in a pinch - so he gets the best on every account. He gets to enjoy the benefits of keeping his shares as they appreciate in value, the benefits of his newly purchased assets appreciating in value, AND the cost of the inflation such cheap credit issued for peoples and institutions like him gets passed onto ordinary people.
Meanwhile our da vinci has probably died in obscurity already because they could not afford university, could not access any credit at all to purchase a house, and the contributions they could have made to humanity wasted away in an amazon warehouse. Being poor is expensive; being rich is cheap. I always find it funny that Americans 100 years ago were proud to be a nation of hard workers, but now their false gods are sheltered men whose lives have never experienced a day's work, whose fortunes were made just taking ownership of someone else's efforts, risk and genius.
This is how economies fail - no point in trying when the chief determiner of success is not hard work and talent, but just having money to harness those who do. And when you have the economy at it is now, with rents through the roof and wages below the floor, it just becomes pointless
tl;dr
it's dangerous
it's illegitimate
it's unfair
and it's self-defeating