[pants2]

I mostly agree with point 1 in the sense that the rich and powerful's money doesn't directly contribute to inflation of basic goods, i.e. Bill Gates can only eat so much rice personally so he's probably not affecting global rice prices.

However, per point 2, the issue is paying people to do useless things. If Bill Gates buys a superyacht staffed by 30 people just paid to operate the yacht, well that's a whole lot of man-hours and natural resources (fuel, raw material) being pumped into a useless object that could otherwise be spent improving the world. And yes, downstream from that (people paid to grow the food that feeds the yacht workers) are now doing mostly useless work.