I think your blog post is confused. People on the left are pro-taxation because they (a) think billionaires do not have superpowers, and are benefiting from some combination of systemic injustices and plain old fraud gussied up for the modern era, and (b) think superheroes actually shouldn't be allowed to have 1,000,000 times the influence over the structure of the world and its economy compared to a mundane human, even if they existed.

There isn't a level of competence or ability that shifts the answer to the morality of power. There's not an earning threshold you can cross that entitles you to own a fiefdom or a level of genius that grants you moral right to dictate how others use your inventions. We create democracy and grant everyone an equal vote in matters that impact their lives. The economy gets layered on top to allocate resources efficiently. If the economy is deciding that some people live like kings and some like serfs, then we've failed to construct an economy that lives up to liberal values.

That is not illuminating at all. Like, the author just imagines the premise and finds three ways to repeat it. There is no exploration into why people think inequality is unfair; the underlying assumption is that it is perfectly natural and trying to address it is hypocritical and harmful.

The other major assumption is that billionaires are rich because of something they did or are good at doing, better than anyone else could in their position. There is no challenge to this assumption in the text.

This belies a deep disconnect with reality, and an unwillingness to confront the idea that maybe excessive inequality is caused by too much concentrated power changing the rules to further concentrate power. Taxation is just one mechanism to combat this tendency; another way is the guillotine.

> If you want to understand why someone would even propose taking from the rich and complain about inequality,

Because they want to take back what was taken from them.

Wow, what a piece of text. Just, wow. Our poor billionaires and their tasty, tasty boots.

I can't speak for others, but this doesn't match my thinking at all.

I want to heavily tax the ultra rich because money is power, and vast inequality in power is undemocratic and just plain dangerous.

I don't really care if somebody buys ten massive yachts. It's annoying and seems wasteful but it's not worth too much of my attention.

But it's another matter if somebody buys politicians, laws, social change. The issue with someone like Elon Musk isn't that he owns a private jet, or even that he owns a rocket company, it's that he bought his way to taking an axe to major parts of our government by pouring unimaginable amounts of money into buying a presidential election.

It's not about grabbing stuff, it's about preventing people from accumulating too much power. The ultra-wealthy should be heavily taxed for the same reason the President shouldn't be given unlimited power to do whatever they want.

this is some of the most insipid dreck i've read in a long time. the only thing illuminated here is the author's complete lack of understanding regarding ability and worth and total inability to think beyond a system imposed upon him by others. i think the kids would say he's "billionaire glazing".

The vibe I get is that he's saying "you poors are just jealous of the billionaires who are smarter and richer than you, so you want to take it away from them"

The comparison to _literal super heroes_ from comic books definitely made me roll my eyes

My problem with billionaires is that their gains are in part from exploitation. I just don't believe that one person can actually produce billions of dollars of value all by themselves. They extract that value from other people and our whole system is structured to promote this.

There are probably millions people who could have been Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or Elon Musk or whoever. A million people with the right skills who maybe were born a few years too late or didn't have the right connections or just didn't have rich enough parents. It's a little too "winner take all" for my taste. And then those few winners end up having disproportionate affect on politics and issues that affect us all. It's just not a great system.

> People usually become billionaires via having “super-powers,” i.e., very unusual abilities, at least within some context.

There are certainly sometimes unusual abilities in a positive sense, but the common case likely falls closer to having an unusual degree of sociopathy. It is unclear to me how else one could view the state of perfectly solvable human suffering in the world and continue to prioritize accumulating wealth over all else, moreover and overwhelmingly at the cost of being party to the suffering itself. Indeed, I suspect having such callous disregard for your fellow person is prerequisite to encountering these unfathomable sums.

When people with an intact capacity for empathy come into huge amounts of money I think it's far more common to give a large proportion of it away (say, Jane Street workers have a culture of doing this). And thus you only stay 'comfortably' wealthy, rather than accumulating so much that it distorts society around your singular existence.

> People usually become billionaires via having “super-powers,” i.e., very unusual abilities, at least within some context.

If you count luck, maybe.

> But what if most billionaires had super-powers of the traditional comic book sort, like x-ray vision or an ability to fly, etc.? That is, what if people with physical super-powers earned billions in the labor market by selling the use of these powers? Would folks be just as eager to tax them to reduce unfair inequality?

Yes, I would.

> But if those few very rich folks had real physical super-powers, we would be a lot more afraid of their simple physical retaliation. They might be very effective at physically resisting our attempts to take their stuff.

Yes, and this is why a lot of superhero movies involve fighting the greedy superpowered villain.