My poor immigrant Indian grandparents became millionaires as did many of their siblings and friends. They certainly wouldn't have done so with socialism.
Being a millionaire is only “powerful” if there are people in poverty. If poverty didn’t exist, then being a millionaire wasn’t actually going to be that big of an increase in life quality.
We should seek to cancel out rent seeking behavior. The thing I hate about our economy is the amount of momentum money gives others while actively holding others back. If our economy was truly based around your abilities it wouldn’t be so annoying.
However, we should also remember that not everyone can work, but everyone deserves a high quality life in line with our powerful economy.
Everyone wants to decouple labor and life, when the actual way to do that is to merge capital and labor such that there are no people who aren't part owner.
The existence of billionaires means that at some point there was an unethical decision made to hold onto power and wealth instead of distributing it to employees
I guess you have never been to a socialist country?
State capitalism != socialism.
All you need for "Capitalism" is a legal system that will support organizational ownership without requiring employment or labor inputs to the organization
Isn't that whole point of being rich? You are better than the others?
There is an always a stack rank, whether we like to agree with this or not. Any attempts to flatten the hierarchy only leads to the mess we saw in the last century.
People like to get rewarded for being better than the rest.