[nicoburns]

The question is not just whether what was built (Amazon) is valuable, but also how valuable what would have been built had Amazon not existed. At best that will be a fraction of Amazon's market value. At worst it could actually be negative.

> How much would be appropriate... 1%? 5%? 25%?

I would argue that a flat percentage isn't the appropriate way to apportion. It should be something like 100% (spread amongst shareholders) of the first $1 million, then progressively less as you jump up in orders of magnitude such that by the time you're looking at 100's of billions it's less than 1%.

This models two things:

- The greater the value of the company, the more likely it is that this is attributable to a market flaw rather the providing of genuine societal value.

- There is a societal cost to wealth disparity (aside from political issues, it actually undermines the market mechanism). Thus as your wealth level becomes more extreme, you should have to provide more to society in order to earn the same marginal wealth gain to compensate for this cost.