I think it’s more than just “irresponsible”. A big part of the argument is that billionaires have the capacity and incentive to do bad things. Like Facebook trying to get everyone hooked on their feed, or Walmart having tons of employees on food stamps. (Or the East India Company fighting a war to keep selling opium to the Chinese...) Big power motivated by greed doesn’t always lead to good things. Sometimes it does, but it’s not obvious that it’s the best way.
This is a problem with profit-maximization, or large corporations, or something, not billionaires — Facebook and Walmart would face the same incentives and do those same things even if their ownership were more distributed.
Well, we can see that corporations owned by everyone (public utilities) mostly don’t behave as sociopathically. They have other pathologies, but not so much this one. So, because everything is a matter of degree, I would assume that making ownership more distributed does make corporations less nasty. And the obvious explanation is that if you’re high above almost all people, that in itself makes you behave sociopathically. Power disparity between people is a kind of evil-in-itself, or a cause of so many evils that it might as well be. So I stand by the view that “no billionaires” is reasonable.
I think it’s more than just “irresponsible”. A big part of the argument is that billionaires have the capacity and incentive to do bad things. Like Facebook trying to get everyone hooked on their feed, or Walmart having tons of employees on food stamps. (Or the East India Company fighting a war to keep selling opium to the Chinese...) Big power motivated by greed doesn’t always lead to good things. Sometimes it does, but it’s not obvious that it’s the best way.
This is a problem with profit-maximization, or large corporations, or something, not billionaires — Facebook and Walmart would face the same incentives and do those same things even if their ownership were more distributed.
Well, we can see that corporations owned by everyone (public utilities) mostly don’t behave as sociopathically. They have other pathologies, but not so much this one. So, because everything is a matter of degree, I would assume that making ownership more distributed does make corporations less nasty. And the obvious explanation is that if you’re high above almost all people, that in itself makes you behave sociopathically. Power disparity between people is a kind of evil-in-itself, or a cause of so many evils that it might as well be. So I stand by the view that “no billionaires” is reasonable.