The problem isn't one specific wealthy family, it's that wealth is always concentrated on few people.
Just because a king dies and gets replaced by another king doesn't help the peasants.
Just because a king dies and gets replaced by another king doesn't help the peasants.
The real issue comes when the really powerful can inflate their and their friends assets at will.
Who would be better at “investing” assets into a new venture: Someone who is wealthy and has a track record of operating successful businesses? Or a government bureaucrat representing the “will of the people” who ultimately makes his salary off the backs of taxpayers?
Furthermore, I recall reading once that wealth inequality was positively correlated with mental illness, even in the rich of a society.
As such, even if there is always some inequality, I think it is worthwhile to try to reduce it, although by boosting the lower part of scale. In other words, if you live in a world where only the rich have cars, you reduce inequality by making cars for the poor like Henry Ford, not by taking rich people's cars.
In the modern US, I think this would entail making housing and education and healthcare more affordable/accessible.
Then Henry Ford displaces John Jacob Astor. You still have wealth inequality, in fact it might have even increased. But the poor now have on-demand mobility to any part of the country in a matter of days.
I don't understand the focus on relative wealth. Why should someone not have, to borrow a phrase, more money than God, if it's not being stolen from others. Why should ability and capital be envied instead left to its own devices?
Bill Gates's fortune split up among everybody in the US would be about $500 a person. You can't seriously think that would make a wit of difference in people's lives, it would disappear in a blip without lifting anybody over the poverty line, and that's even if it was spent wisely, which it wouldn't be.
What the peasants need are ways they can earn money, because money comes from productivity and the peasants will quickly need more than $500 times the number of billionaires consumed by the revolution. BTW most of Bill Gates's wealth is actually tied up in productive assets that are producing things the peasants need, and providing them jobs.
That's the problem. It's tied up, and it doesn't need to be. Unlike institutional investors those who are in the Forbes 400 don't need to consult shareholders or basically anybody, they are already past that point. In fact a family office is essentially just the billionaire and a couple of accountants...people resent them for not going double or nothing on moonshots.
Bill Gates isn't getting any younger, so is Warren Buffet and Munger. When will they open the floodgates? The Rockefeller foundation is still standing and the founder died almost 100 years ago