The idea is that one person gets a great deal of wealth from the creation of something that they were the most important in that creation. We would all agree that what Gates and Bezos acomplished was laudable and needs to be encouraged in society. However, in a different era Arthur Sloan (GM) or Henry Ford actually ended up with a lower percentage of the wealth of their companies. More of that wealth was distributed as opposed to concentrated in a founder or CEO. Did that discourage their excellence? I don't think so. Did it make a healthier society? I would argue yes.
> We would all agree that what Gates and Bezos acomplished was laudable and needs to be encouraged in society.
Absolutely not.
It’s a completely reasonably argument to assert that both men made the bulk of their outsized wealth via anti-competitive monopolistic behavior that was harmful to the markets they operated in.
Gates was in fact accused of this by the US Justice Department so it’s not exactly a fringe theory.
> We would all agree that what Gates and Bezos acomplished was laudable and needs to be encouraged in society.
Not necessarily. There are plenty of people who think that the growth of Microsoft and Amazon came from doing sketchy things that should not be repeated.
> We would all agree that what Gates and Bezos acomplished was laudable and needs to be encouraged in society.
I definitely don’t agree that either of these companies predatory tactics, and especially Amazon’s treatment of workers, is something that should be lauded or encouraged.
Did the wealth of car companies go to labor? Or did the wealth go to the venture capitalists (or whatever the venture capital equivalents of the day were)?
The real wealth that car companies created went to consumers in form of consumer surplus.
The automobile used to be a toy for millionaires, now even (American) minimum-wage workers can travel daily in comfortable, individual, climate-controlled vehicles capable of incredible speeds.
I would pay $100k for a ten-year-old Civic but I don't have to because the car companies work hard and compete with each other and have driven down costs and prices to the bare minimum.
Same for many of todays billionaires / huge corporations. They're generally not stealing from us, but creating enormous wealth for all of us in the form of consumer surplus with their desirable goods and services.
But are the billionaires the ones actually responsible for creating all that value? Is Bezos actually responsible for 10 000x the value of what Amazon produces than a worker? If Bezos didn't exist, there would be another "Bezos". He just happened to be there at the right time and do the right things. We discount all the effects that luck and society play in making a "Bezos". The company is what is providing that huge amount of value, not the person.
You have to apply your argument to yourself, which is "are you responsible for creating any of the value you create?" If you didn't exist there would be another you, so luck and society made you. But you know that is not true. You are where you are, and you can step away at any time.
People willing to work for less in countries other than America is where much of the consumer surplus in the past few decades has come from. As well as not needing people to work in the first place.
Henry Ford famously chose to pay his workers enough that they would be able to afford to buy his cars.
Also, I'm not sure that there was a meaningful equivalent to venture capitalists in that era, but I'm not at all confident enough in my history to state that with any weight.
