I don't think it's practical to eliminate wealth inequality. But we can certainly limit it. I would also be less concerned about wealth inequality if we had more robust legal frameworks to prevent wealthy people and institutions from having an outsized influence--for example, campaign finance limits and public campaign financing, elimination of super-pacs and dark money, lobbying regulations, and bans on government officials becoming lobbyists, etc. Instead, these guardrails are steadily eroding. Citizens United devestated campaign finance regulations. Last year in Snyder v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that federal bribery law does not prohibit gifts or gratuities given to state and local officials after an official act. Of course these are just the kinds of rulings the Federalist Society has hoped to see, financed by the Mercers, Kochs, and other wealthy families. Six of the nine current justices have ties to the Federalist Society.

I’m not the person you’re responding to, but I’ll answer that yes, it has always been a problem that so much influence is concentrated in so few hands. It’s been said that a dictatorship would be the best form of governance if you could ensure the dictator would always be the best one possible. But you can’t. When you allow such concentrations of power, at some point someone who is willing to abuse that power, or someone who is simply incompetent, will come along and it’s a disaster for everybody.

Wealth inequality is not innate; there have been plenty of civilizations with far less of it. It’s only an inherent part of free-market capitalism.

>Wealth inequality is not innate; there have been plenty of civilizations with far less of it. It’s only an inherent part of free-market capitalism.

Please by all means, name these superior civilizations with minimal wealth inequality. The fact that some people are immensely rich and many others aren't is much less important than how a given society regulates individual rights to live one's life and be protected by the law. Wealth inequality is also less important than the specific question of how these rich people became what they are and how much power they have over those less wealthy than them. Ie: You can't honestly compare a modern market economy with a feudal barony.

In much of the modern "terribly" unequal market economies, a Bill Gates or Musk can be freely told to go fuck themselves by anyone less wealthy than them and their wealth has little to do with some random average person's capacity to better their own life. The same often doesn't apply to societies with low wealth inequality, which coincidentally are often poorly developed and authoritarian.

I don't really care if Warren Buffet, Zuckerberg or Ellison can buy a dozen private jets any time they like if I live in the same society with most of my legal and economic rights protected, and with the ability to create a comfortable life also respected. I would however worry about a more supposedly egalitarian state in which central authority figures have given themselves the legal right to confiscate property and earned capital for reasons of ideology.

Also, while many on this site live in a bubble in which the importance and influence of Musk's X (previously Twitter) is grossly fetishized, in the real world, it's just not that important. Musk can throw all the tantrums he likes on the site and ban whoever he pleases, and for 99% of the world, it doesn't matter enough to be worth a single shit.

It's when he obtains literal political power that I worry, and the mechanism behind the kind of authority that could confiscate earned wealth beyond a certain ideologically or politically defined point can at any time fall victim to someone with the kind of grossly egotistical personality that someone like X's owner has.

having the legal authority to prevent a rich person from owning a social media platform is much more dangerous than that rich person simply owning a social media platform (in a landscape of others that it has to increasingly compete with).

> Please by all means, name these superior civilizations with minimal wealth inequality.

You have to go quite far back to find those civilizations, so you can't really compare them to modern ones. Also depends on what the goals of society are. It's possible that people are happier on average in a poorer but more equal society, so would it be inferior just because it has less material wealth?

> It's when he obtains literal political power that I worry,

Money is literal political power. If it wasn't, you would not be seeing a bunch of billionaires running the government. I agree that current forms of government also concentrate power too much, but there will always be some kind of entity that makes the rules, and always those with the most resources will naturally be the most able to take control over that entity and make rules that benefit them.

> having the legal authority to prevent a rich person from owning a social media platform is much more dangerous than that rich person simply owning a social media platform (in a landscape of others that it has to increasingly compete with).

I agree, but letting people amass unlimited amounts of wealth will lead to that authority anyway. Once someone or some group of people is wealthy enough that they're able to buy the government, they'll obviously use it to give themselves that and any other authority they wish. It doesn't matter if that government is small or large, weak or powerful. There will always be a rule creating and enforcing entity, and that entity becomes whatever those who control it wish it to be. It will be controlled by those with the most resources. The solution is therefore not to try to limit the functionality of the tool that is government, but to maximize the number of people that have control over it. That requires having a more equal distribution of wealth.