[ZeroGravitas]

Billionaire Russian oligarchs starting a war is not an improvement in the market failure. It is in fact much much worse, even if they got poorer at the same time.

People do this a lot and count the money they made with their monopolies and not the money they destroyed by having a monopoly.

You'd expect better from something called The Economist.

[gruez]

But the article specifically brings up russian oligarchs as a contrast to "the Deserving Rich"?

[ZeroGravitas]

Yes and their metric considers that things are "getting better" because those undeserving rich started a war and killed over half a million people and caused about 2 million causalities.

Their argument for why we don't need wealth taxes is partly supported by a bunch of super rich people causing widespread mayhem and so slightly reducing their own wealth.

[gruez]

I'm sure everyone would agrees that the ideal outcome is everyone getting along and singing Kumbaya, but Russian oligarchs losing their wealth and influence to "the deserving rich" is still a win for meritocracy in a very narrow sense. It's sad that people had to die to arrive at that outcome, but at the same time it's not like we made a decision "hey should we start a war to knock the oligarchs down a peg?". Moreover it's questionable whether the oligarchs even "started" the war in any meaningful sense. I'm sure if you anonymously polled them, they'd all prefer if the war didn't happen. They didn't do much to stop putin, but in a country with weak human rights and rule of law, the most likely outcome of them opposing putin would be them mysteriously falling out of an apartment balcony one day. Saying they "started" the war is like claiming the average democratic voter in the US "caused" the ICE killings because they didn't fervently oppose the trump administration enough.