| > It's anti-meritocratic for someone to invest their money intelligently in the stock market? Absolutely. To achieve such results you need so much luck and such a headstart that any merits you might additionally have are drowned in everything else that contributes to "your" "success". > How do you determine the threshold where on one side they're entitled to the wealth they earned, and on the other side their wealth is unfairly earned? Rule of thumb. About $10 million. But it's not about who deserves what. It's about how much influence can society safely let a single random primate have. The actual number will be determined by the political process. It's a number that seems sufficiently unachievable for 51% of people so that they feel safe to vote to heavily tax those who hace that much. Current barriers to that is that the very wealthy own the culture and they are selling poor people the illusion that everybody can be the rich and what they are doing is actually building value not extracting it despite the fact that trillions of dollars have been extracted from the control of democracy and market and placed exclusively in their hands. |
You are severely overrating how much influence $10m buys you, and very severely underrating how much influence you can have without personally having $10m dollars.