“Is it a good idea for five mega-billionaires to own the same amount of wealth as the bottom 50% of the world?”

I get your point. Probably it’s not the best idea, nor the most efficient, if we were aliens, or the operators of The Matrix, designing a planet or a society. But we’re not. Coercing minorities to adapt to what the-majority-plus-one see as “good ideas” is a recipe for disaster.

We can do that only when everybody participating willingly agrees to accept the outcome of that democratic process. Otherwise, and unless individual rights of others are affected directly, I suspect everybody should be free to do as they please.

You can imagine so many ideas that would sound “good” to a majority of the people: it’s good that parents read to their kids, it’s good that people don’t destroy their property or their belongings on a whim, it’s good to smile to strangers and to be polite to them, it’s good to be well informed before going to vote, it’s good to learn foreign languages and to travel. Do you agree that all those things would contribute to a better world and a more civilised and happy society? I’m not being frivolous: I bet that studies can demonstrate that those behaviours, if adopted widely, would actually reduce violence and improve health indicators in the world…

Why does it not even cross your mind to submit those ideas to the democratic process, or to have them encoded in the law?

Besides, letting individuals keep what they earn, even when what they earn is a lot, may be efficient after all:

• What do those individuals do with that wealth? Do they invest a large chunk of that in philanthropy (eg, Gates, Zuckerberg)? Do they provide positive examples for others and disseminate good ideas?
• Do those large pools of capital make possible ambitious, long-term enterprises that no selfish, short-sighted politician would tackle, or that few public institutions could fund (eg, Musk)?
• Do those fortunes create jobs, and expand the economy, as they grow?
• Would society get the output of exceptional individuals if the incentives to work extremely hard and share the fruits of creativity and talent were severely diminished (because of confiscatory taxes)?
• Would regular entrepreneurs, inventors, performers and artists shoot for the moon and be as motivated if they could not aim at becoming super-rich?