1. The power of money depends on the greed or neediness (also when created through usury) of those receiving it. A billionaire doesn't have any power to do any more than anyone else. It's the willingness of so many to exchange their labor, etc. for money that allows billionaires to exert outsized influence on things they should not have influence over. Instead of blaming the cause of the temptation, take a good look at your own moral mediocrity and how you respond to the temptation to sell out. I know many people in tech who bitch and moan about this or that corporation, but suddenly become silent the moment they end up working for one of those corporations (such as through an acquisition).

2. Conversations about the 1% often betray an underlying pathology of envy. Many hate billionaires because they're envious of what they have. Why would inequality of material goods be a problem per se? You can see that it isn't when you compare someone with an upper middle class household income with a billionaire. Does that upper middle class family really have a reason to shake their fists at the billionaires when it comes to income? No, of course not. Who cares if some guy makes X times as much as you? (If you have a problem, then perhaps you ought to check your envy.) The problem isn't inequality. It's poverty. And the boorish worship of Mammon.

3. The belief in zero sum wealth is utterly false. Everyone who understands basic economics knows that the economic wealth of the world today far outstrips any other epoch in history. The idea that billionaires only have what they have because they effectively stole it from you is exactly the kind of agitation that communists would engage in in Soviet Russia and Maoist China and the tumultuous years that led to their creation. It's the politics of envy and it's a hideous affair.

4. There are of course problems associated with billionaires that is not intrinsic to the wealth they possess. For example, the influence billionaires have over politics and society through the media, through education, through lobbying, and so on. They may be dealt with in various ways, such as actual committed and personal involvement in improving your local community in some way instead of raging ineffectually on Facebook and Twitter. A lazy, effeminate populace that only knows how to complain, and yell, and emote deserves what it gets.

5. While socialism is a tyranny, a grotesque perversion (and no, the Scandinavian countries aren't socialist), rapacious and ideological capitalism is likewise unnatural and perverse. By "rapacious and ideological capitalism", I really mean one that is laissez-faire in a doctrinaire way, where the market is the dominant social institution and the consequent ethos one of consumerism and commodification of everything, one dominated by powerful corporations unanswerable to government or public opinion, doctrinaire about the minimalization or elimination of social welfare institutions even in the absence of a sensible private alternative, and globalist of a kind that is opposed to corporate and individual loyalties to the nation state.

6. Sure, billionaires can run self-serving philanthropies. I doubt it stems from a feeling of guilt, but I don't know the individual consciences of billionaires (and conscience need to be formed to feel guilt, something that has been categorically discouraged by our culture along with shame and the concept of sin). Some may wish to genuinely do good. Some may be interested in their next conquest. Some may be afraid of the mob. Certainly, Zuckerberg's "free internet" plan for India was a patently obvious move to magnify his own power. The guy seems pathetically oblivious to how transparent he is. Social skills aren't his strong suit.

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