Thread by @AlexandraErin

@andylassner Nobody's saying those people shouldn't exist. Their vast wealth was created through hoarding the value of labor of others, and it's great that they're kind of magnanimous about it, but the fact that Buffett can give away half his money and then it all comes back is weird, huh?

@andylassner The idea behind "billionaires should not exist" is that the existence of someone with so much money they can't possibly spend it and can't even give it away fast enough is an indictment of the way the value created by labor is distributed in our system, and we should adjust.

@andylassner The lifestyle of somebody who has $X00,000,000 and is still making more money allt he time but is not able to hoard wealth is not materially different from someone with billions. Each additional dollar buys less benefit for the person who has it.

@andylassner On the other hand, that same dollar that means nothing to the billionaire can save the life of someone starving. Another $1,000 means nothing to Bill Gates but it keeps a roof over a struggling family's head.

@andylassner So just for fun, imagine for a moment what the world would look like if all along, those billionaires had paid their employees and contractors enough that today the billionaires were worth several hundred millions of dollars, not billions.

@andylassner All that wealth being more widely distributed, what would it do? For one thing, right off the bat, way more of it would have been spent. The less money you have, the more money coming in you're going to spend. Repairs you put off, dental work, splurges. Necessities and luxuries.

@andylassner Bill Gates doesn't necessary spend much differently at 500 million dollars than at 50 billion, charitable giving aside. He's not spending a hundred more times on food as a billionaire than he would as a hundred-millionaire, for instance. The benefit to the economy is not direct.

@andylassner But if you double the wages of employees, spending by the middle class will increase at a rate that is closer to a 1:1 correlation with the increase of their income. That economic activity, what does it do? It creates wealth. The economy grows. The size of the pie grows.

@andylassner More money going around means more money being spent means more money is CREATED, it's not a closed system, successful businesses grow the economy, take risks, get money from banks which get money from the fed, money supply is going up but it's not inflationary, we're just richer

@andylassner Now you're thinking "What about the charitable giving?" Eh, ideally we're not relying on a king appointed by the great god Plutocracy to cure malaria or give us clean water. I mean, you see the problem with that, right?

@andylassner If distributed the products of our labor more equitably... everyone's got more money to give to charity. And we have normalized the idea that everyone's entitled to a share, then it's easier to manage these things through an organization instituted To Promote the General Welfare.

@andylassner So people have more money which is less need for charity, the government has more money which is public money, our money, which is less need for charity, and guess what? Bill Gates is still rich beyond the dreams of man. Warren Buffett is, too.

@andylassner Hundreds of millions of dollars with steady income generated by a financial empire is still enough money to basically be a wizard. Have breakfast in Milan and then fly to Tokyo for an opera and then take a chopper to your megayacht which has tender including a regular yacht.

@andylassner I'm not a radical leftist by any stretch; I don't indict the idea of making a profit and I don't think there's anything wrong with being rich, the problem is that we have a system that requires some people to be poor.

But hundreds of millions of dollars is *enough*.