[epicureanideal]

Society would be better if we could, and we would all benefit.

Looking at what the growth trajectories are of countries with high corruption, it’s not great, so our growth is probably still reduced by the corruption or lawlessness that still exists.

[thfuran]

Why do you think having billionaires at all is of benefit to society? Or do you just mean that the people inclined to break rules to accumulate unreasonable wealth would just follow them instead if that worked as well and that is what would benefit society?

[epicureanideal]

Because in a well organized society where wealth accumulation is not by corruption, then by definition it would be by creating value, which benefits everyone.

The alternative is something like oligarchs that extract wealth because of state granted monopolies, corporatism that strangles competition with anti competitive regulation, etc. The accumulation of wealth is all out of proportion and possibly not even correlated in those cases with the production of actual value.

[thfuran]

Wealth is accumulated by capturing value, not by creating it.

[epicureanideal]

Technically true, but ideally it would be capturing a portion of value created by them, rather than a portion of value created by others, is my point.