Incorrect. There should not even _be_ billionaires. It's _long past_ time to tax billionaires. At this point, it may not even be possible.
People who say this stuff usually have zero clue how money works.
People who often focus in on just the capitalist entrepreneur sect of the billionaire class often have zero clue how global Class Systems work, and just how many billionaires there are that have never worked an honest day in their lives.
Skimming through the Forbes list, the top ones are pretty much ones I recognize as having been founders, CEOs, and/or early employees of large corporations. As I scroll down the list, there are a lot more that I don't know or believe are merely decedents of those such people, but I still see plenty I recognize as founders or as still running companies. Is it 10%? 50%? 80%?
Don't just assert we're clueless without providing some source to show us that we're wrong. Far too often such assertions aren't actually based on anything but vibes, so "just trust me" isn't much good.
Yes. If you own over $1B of corporations, you have too much power.
And if so, who should we hand over the power to? If we tax assets, it will be given to the government, which historically hasn't been all that great at allocating capital.
Yes.
> who should we hand over the power to?
The shares are sold to whoever's buying, so the billionaire can pay the wealth tax, to the government.
This would essentially be the same as when someone wins a car on a game show. The car is taxable income, which means that they sometimes have to sell the car to pay that tax.
> the government, which historically hasn't been all that great at allocating capital
The only way anyone gets to be a billionaire is by hoarding wealth. It's a catastrophically bad allocation of capital.
Would you have an issue if someone eventually collected a billion thankyou notes?
The reason poor people are poor is not that rich people are rich! The rich being rich and the poor being poor are 2 separate phenomena.
It's not like there's some fixed pot of utility in the world, and the more one person has the less someone else has.
There is quite literally a finite amount of resources on this planet. Land, gold, oxygen, lithium... These things are limited. The more land one person has, the less there is for others.
This is a terrible analogy because it captures the good reason why there are billionaires (we reward them for building something useful) and none of the problems that come with it (wealth and power inequality, economic externalities, etc.)