Count me in this bracket. A progressive income tax should prevent billionaires in the first place, and for less controllable things like an IPO a wealth tax will do the rest.

Well, I wasn’t so much getting at what you’re saying—which I completely agree with btw—but rather, I’m trying to understand what prevents people from realizing that the reason for their poor living conditions is the accumulation of capital in far too few hands.

The reason for my question: the global resurgence of fascism, which, in my opinion, is the direct consequence of the influence of billionaires, because they use this mindless ideology with all their might to pit people against one another and thus distract them from where the real problem lies.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there are so many democracies where people view immigration as the most pressing problem. Absurdly, this is also the case in my home country, Germany, even though the German labor market needs far more foreign workers in a wide variety of sectors.

This is classic fascist ideology, which we unfortunately know all too well in this country. What’s frightening, however, is that the billionaires wield their influence so effectively that even the German masses no longer remember their inhuman faces and now still parrot whatever the algorithm—or rather, the will of the billionaires—presents to them.

It’s a tragedy, and my question in this post simply seeks to understand how this can be—how people fail to grasp that it is the powerful, and by no means the powerless, who should be despised.

There’s absolutely something to this, in that religions that enforce hierarchies are going to be more attractive to people who desire hierarchies (befitting from them or not). There’s no form in which you can be a billionaire without believing in hierarchy because it’s about as peak of human power as you can get

Aren't the circumstances that give rise to them simply the fact that societies allow individuals to become so wealthy in the first place?

The problem, however, is that the world's largest corporations pay virtually no taxes, which gives rise to the very serious problem the world is facing today.

competent people are in charge.

that's why they pay very little tax.

And who do you think has the greatest interest in this? Who do you think has the power to make it happen?

A healthy tax code would not allow billionaires to exist

But why wouldn't it solve the problem if top tax rates were imposed that would make it impossible for such parasitic investment firms to emerge in the first place?

You don't have to kill them. You could simply take their money. Then they wouldn't be billionaires. It's not like the money belongs to them. It belongs to the government. They're just holding on to it for a while.

I can't understand why you think of murder when it comes to the question of whether it makes sense for societies to allow people to become so rich that they rise above everyone else. In reasonably functioning states, this can be regulated by law.

You're probably from the U.S., right?

What if society takes away the billionaire's money so that he ceases to be a billionaire. Does the billionaire still exist then?

Yes, I completely agree with you. I just fear that reality shows that billionaires—who, after all, aren’t some kind of fantasy—simply don’t do that. Quite the opposite: With their power, which is equivalent to the capital of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, they do everything in their power to make life for ordinary people worse and worse. We’re seeing this happen right now.

I simply cannot understand why people fail to recognize the reason for their increasingly dire situations.

I do understand that the reason is that the billionaires have so much capital that they control the media and can thus spread misinformation massively. That is precisely why fascism is so strong again—it is so attractive to billionaires because, with its ideology, it is designed to protect the “elites.” However, it’s not foreigners or any of the bogeymen this idiotic “doctrine” has to offer: the problem is those who spread this inhuman ideology—namely, the billionaires.