The argument is basically just that there’s not much of a way to make a billion dollars, as a relatively arbitrary metric, without resulting to unethical means, and trying to make up for it with ethical strategies afterwards is kind of a losing game, you’re starting from behind. There’s rent-seeking behavior and the ownership of the means of production yadda yadda ya, but really, it’s just that the rich tend to hold a large portion of undemocratic power, control over other people. You can maybe say it’s democratic on the basis that people “voted with their dollar” to make them rich or some shit, but that’s kind of a stupid chain of logic and I just want to bash it without contestation right now.

I think the counterpoint to “we would only have rich people controlling our politicians”, would be, we should not have lobbying, you know. Nobody should be controlling our politicians, sort of thing. Or, we should all equally be controlling our politicians, I guess. Which isn’t really something that I’ve seen any of these guys trying to get politicians to do, and I don’t think it’d be effective if they did, because it would be both against their own self-interest, so there’s a selection bias against that, and it’d be against the interest of the politician that wants to make money, so there would be a selection bias against that. You’re also getting a selection bias for the politicians and the rich in the form of, they both probably believe the system works, or, they both believe that money being allocated to someone generally means that person is capable, and is simply valuable to the economy. If they didn’t believe either of those, the chances that they find themselves in their positions goes down.