IMO, the issue of 1% wealth is not an ethical one. I don't care how much money anyone makes, I don't think it's unethical for some people to have more and some people to have less.
But, when we get to these scales, where a very small number of individuals controls large amounts of social resources, it becomes a society-wide efficiency issue. Solitary individuals cannot allocate capital as well as large collections of people can. A thriving startup ecosystem is better than a single person picking winners and losers.
When you have individuals controlling huge swathes of resources, you get weird outcomes, like the Metaverse or WeWork or the Line. These things are monumental wastes of human effort, and they naturally arise when the distribution of wealth becomes too extreme. And it gets worse and worse when they begin suppressing private enterprise by leveraging the state, which is certainly already happening (see: tech execs paying $1m to stand behind DJT at the inauguration).
I don't care about the individual "The 1%". I don't care who they are, how craven and greedy, how creepy, how ugly, how disgusting. I don't care whether they are going to heaven or hell. What I care about is that they are burning vast amounts of human potential on things that don't benefit anyone at all. They're wasting huge amounts of time. I think about this every time I have to wait 3h on hold with a huge, bloated, inefficient corporation, whose owner spends a quarter of their time schmoozing in Washington D.C: a startup should be there competing, preventing me from wasting my time!
But, when we get to these scales, where a very small number of individuals controls large amounts of social resources, it becomes a society-wide efficiency issue. Solitary individuals cannot allocate capital as well as large collections of people can. A thriving startup ecosystem is better than a single person picking winners and losers.
When you have individuals controlling huge swathes of resources, you get weird outcomes, like the Metaverse or WeWork or the Line. These things are monumental wastes of human effort, and they naturally arise when the distribution of wealth becomes too extreme. And it gets worse and worse when they begin suppressing private enterprise by leveraging the state, which is certainly already happening (see: tech execs paying $1m to stand behind DJT at the inauguration).
I don't care about the individual "The 1%". I don't care who they are, how craven and greedy, how creepy, how ugly, how disgusting. I don't care whether they are going to heaven or hell. What I care about is that they are burning vast amounts of human potential on things that don't benefit anyone at all. They're wasting huge amounts of time. I think about this every time I have to wait 3h on hold with a huge, bloated, inefficient corporation, whose owner spends a quarter of their time schmoozing in Washington D.C: a startup should be there competing, preventing me from wasting my time!