[pdonis]

> you're interpreting my moral claim (billionaires are a policy failure) as specific advocacy of a one-time wealth tax on billionaires and no other shift of U.S. policy

No, I'm disagreeing with your moral claim and illustrating how any policy that does not allow for creation of wealth is doomed. And any policy that does allow for creation of wealth needs to consider the reasons why people are willing to do it. Historically, satisfying leftist social and political dogma has not been among those reasons.

> The technology that enabled this massive creation of wealth wasn't created by Bezos though

Yes, it's true that wealth creation is never done in a vacuum--it builds on previous wealth creation. The technology that enabled Amazon's massive creation of wealth was another massive creation of wealth. Some of the initial technology for the Internet was created through publicly funded research, but the actual buildout of the infrastructure, along with optimizing the technology for a global network--the actual creation of that massive amount of wealth that connects every computer in the world to every other--was done by companies wanting to make money by selling Internet services.

> All billionaires get their wealth this way, by exploiting their workers

This is your opinion, not fact.

> all the big tech companies participate in anti-competitive behavior (vendor lock-in, etc) which benefits them individually but hurts the wealth of society as a whole.

Then why not focus on the anti-competitive behavior, instead of trying to remake the entire society in your leftist image?

[door5]

>Then why not focus on the anti-competitive behavior, instead of trying to remake the entire society in your leftist image?

because my leftist image is good

[pdonis]

Really? Please show me all the wonderful countries built in your leftist image where everyone is rich and nobody has to worry about poverty.

[door5]

Socialism is a material struggle, it isn't an idealist Utopia where everything is perfect. It's a process. And most socialist regimes have been in the developing world, which had much less to work with and much weaker infrastructure. Regardless, China has lifted nearly a billion people out of extreme poverty over the last 40 years. I also think that Cuba's accomplishments have been admirable, despite decades of aggression and embargo from the United States. You may compare these regimes unfavourably to a developed country, but that's an unfair comparison, because they weren't developed countries before socialists took over. Compare them to other, capitalist countries in the global south and I think there is no question what model works better