this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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It makes some sense to approportion to them the share of the negative externalities of their businesses that matches the share of the revenue they get as profit from those businesses (since the business has to have a higher level of activity to generate profit that it would to merelly break even).
However for the reason you pointed out it doesn't make sense to assigned to them the responsibility for the negative externalities of creating wealth which they did not themselves capture even if they own the businesses that did that wealth creation.
Of course, things can be quite a lot more complex than this - for example, if a billionaire choses to go with a disproportionally more poluting process in their business to get a small increase in profit, doesn't he or she have responsability for that extra polution which goes well beyond merelly the extra profit they got? - but as a rule of thumb it makes sense that people's responsability for the polution in wealth creation activities is proportional to how much of that created wealth ends up in their hands.