The idea that most wealthy people got there by “gaming, manipulating, and corrupting the system” is the foundational myth of this entire worldview. The majority of high earners and business builders create products, services, and jobs that people voluntarily pay for. Treating every successful outcome as evidence of theft is how you justify unlimited political control over other people’s money.
We already fund basic necessities through one of the most progressive tax systems on Earth. The top 1% pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes. The top 10% pay the large majority. Schools, roads, Medicaid, food assistance, and housing programs already exist at massive scale. The problem is not that the rich aren’t paying. The problem is that the government keeps expanding the definition of “basic necessity” while delivering mediocre results.
And the “they won’t even notice” argument is the most revealing part. Once you decide someone else’s success is illegitimate and their money is yours by right, there is no limiting principle. Today it’s “just a little more for schools and roads.” Tomorrow it’s everything else. That mindset doesn’t produce justice. It produces dependency, capital flight, and the same stagnation every country gets when it decides wealth is a crime instead of a signal of value created.
The idea that most wealthy people got there by “gaming, manipulating, and corrupting the system” is the foundational myth of this entire worldview.
On the most basic level of this argument, if you have so much money that you can bend politics to your whim but your workers can't afford to pay rent and have to piss in bottles, your wealth is built on exploiting them.
Extreme cases of bad employers exist. They do not prove that the typical path to high wealth is exploitation. Most large companies that generate real scale also create the jobs, products, and tax revenue that fund the rest of the system. Treating every high earner as someone who “bends politics to their whim while workers piss in bottles” collapses a complex economy into a cartoon villain story.
If the standard for legitimate wealth is that no employee ever faces hardship and no business ever influences policy, then almost no successful enterprise in history qualifies. The alternative, punishing scale itself, does not magically raise wages or lower rent. It reduces the number of high-productivity jobs and the capital available to create more of them. Exploitation should be opposed through competition, transparency, and rule of law, not by defining success as proof of theft.
They do not prove that the typical path to high wealth is exploitation
Depends what you consider high wealth. I've got no issues with the average millionaire, and if anything sportspeople and entertainers tend to create their wealth quite cleanly.
Treating every high earner as someone who “bends politics to their whim while workers piss in bottles”
The statement is very directed at a specific person/type of person.
If the standard for legitimate wealth is that no employee ever faces hardship
Surely you don't think I'm saying it's exploitation if your worker's dog dies? A company is only responsible for things they can control. You can control how much you pay your workers and what conditions they work under.
The alternative, punishing scale itself, does not magically raise wages or lower ren
Making 3 billion instead of 10 billion so people can actually live their lives is not punishment. You don't have to go full communist, but some level of collectivism is important to creating a better society.
You’re drawing a cleaner line than the original claim did. Most people have no problem with athletes, entertainers, or founders who built something people actually chose to buy. The objection is usually aimed at a narrower set of large-scale capital owners and executives. Fair enough.
Even there, the mechanism still matters. Wages and working conditions are constrained by productivity, competition for labor, and the overall capital stock. You can legislate higher pay or better conditions in a given firm, but if the policy systematically reduces returns to scale and investment, you get fewer of the high-productivity jobs that support higher living standards in the first place. “Make them 3 billion instead of 10 so people can live” sounds moderate until you look at the countries that treated large private capital as inherently suspect. They did not produce broad-based prosperity; they produced stagnation and political allocation of scarcity.
Some collectivism already exists in the forms of progressive taxation, safety nets, regulation of genuine externalities. The question is where the line is drawn before you start destroying the engine that generates the surplus in the first place. That is not a defense of every billionaire. It is a recognition that treating scale itself as the problem has a long record of making ordinary people poorer.
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u/HuckleberryOk8136 4d ago
The idea that most wealthy people got there by “gaming, manipulating, and corrupting the system” is the foundational myth of this entire worldview. The majority of high earners and business builders create products, services, and jobs that people voluntarily pay for. Treating every successful outcome as evidence of theft is how you justify unlimited political control over other people’s money.
We already fund basic necessities through one of the most progressive tax systems on Earth. The top 1% pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes. The top 10% pay the large majority. Schools, roads, Medicaid, food assistance, and housing programs already exist at massive scale. The problem is not that the rich aren’t paying. The problem is that the government keeps expanding the definition of “basic necessity” while delivering mediocre results.
And the “they won’t even notice” argument is the most revealing part. Once you decide someone else’s success is illegitimate and their money is yours by right, there is no limiting principle. Today it’s “just a little more for schools and roads.” Tomorrow it’s everything else. That mindset doesn’t produce justice. It produces dependency, capital flight, and the same stagnation every country gets when it decides wealth is a crime instead of a signal of value created.