I'm a bit confused by this statement. In the vast majority of cases where an individual purchases something, they do it because they want it (food is purchased because the body desires food, phones are purchased because the brain likes communication and connectedness, medical care is purchased because people realize it helps them, etc). Therefore, for someone to have accumulated a large amount of profit, enough people must have decided that whatever they are offering is beneficial.
Simply put, if a person has a large amount of money earned through a truly free market, then they must have provided a benefit to society.
Now, this can be confused by things like regulation. Regulatory capture, corruption, and many other things can all force people to purchase things they do not desire or do not provide as much benefit as a different product, but this is not an issue that can be solved by more regulation or taxation. Instead, it is an issue with interference in the market which causes the inequalities that I would agree, very much do exist.
Your second paragraph is problematic. First, truly free markets are unlikely to be an accurate statement of where someone earned their money (e.g. the US is nowhere near that, so that excludes every wealthy American). Second, the use of earn -- does that exclude people who extract a large amount of money, like Martin Shrekli? Finally, it does not address the elephant in the room, that most people who have lots of money have inherited it, not necessarily earned it themselves.
1) I agree that free markets are not where most people earn there money, but to me it seems like that is something we should strive for by reducing and stopping interference in the market by government regulation.
2) Martin Shkreli is an interesting statement (assuming you are referring to his raising of drug prices, not what he was prosecuted for). I strongly believe that the only reason he was able to raise prices so exorbitantly is because of interference in the market place both on the grounds of copyright laws and the stringent drug testing that is required. If something like google were to suddenly start charging five thousand dollars to use the site, people would quickly move to a competitor (or, if there was no competitor, someone would create one). This is not possible in the drug industry due to government regulation, so although what he did was wrong, it is not something I think can be solved with more laws.
3) Sure, most people have inherited there money, but in a free market someone up the line most certainly earned it. Assuming you don't believe that there is something that makes one person more special than another, who is holding money is irrelevant to whether or not it is fairly earned.
I'm not sure what to tell you, people who have built organizations that employee thousands of people have contributed more to society than average. If that needs further justification then I'm not even sure how to respond to that.
You're reading things into what I'm saying - if Elon Musk raises a campaign fundraiser for his favorite candidate, do I mind that? Do I mind him having more "power" in that people listen to his twitter account over joe schmo? Not at all. Is he colluding with other executives to fix automative prices and then pressuring his candidate to change regulations as a favor when they're elected? Yes. That makes me a "plutocracy supporter"?
>I'm not sure what to tell you, people who have built organizations that employee thousands of people have contributed more to society than average. If that needs further justification then I'm not even sure how to respond to that.
A very large portion of those people have contributed more suffering to the world, and continue to do so through the continued exploitation of the worker class and lower classes.
Should probably bow out after this one; I don't think there is much room for rational discussion for my viewpoints here.
I agree that walmart is a piece of crap, but you don't really know what suffering is. Please ask your grandparents what options their grandparents had in life.
If you have some notion that corporations that try to profit are a blight on society and that their abolition will lead to some dream world, then by all means. Please knock over all the establishments, nationalize all corporations and divy profits amongst the workers, redivide the wealth of every millionaire, publish a list of banned words like 'wealth', and so on, and then point me to the nearest democracy.
"I'm not sure what to tell you, people who have built organizations that employee thousands of people have contributed more to society than average. If that needs further justification then I'm not even sure how to respond to that."
I hear that often but is it really true? Maybe they just have found a way to funnel money to themselves instead of it going to other businesses. For example has Walmart created anything or did they just take the money that would otherwise have gone to a lot of small businesses? For sure they were very smart but did they make the country better? I am not so sure.
They sold things more cheaply than other businesses could do. That's almost the purest example of benefiting others you can come up with, it's only one step short of literally putting money in their customer's pockets.
In the end they took money out of the pockets of a lot of small bushiness, put a lot of it into their own pockets and also a lot benefited customers. Maybe it's an overall benefit but I don't think it's that clear. It's not like they developed some new technology that opened totally new markets.
What, so the other businesses should be allowed to remain profitable while screwing over their customers on price even after a competitor comes along who can do a better job? Please, this is what markets are all about.
I'd settle for decent healthcare and enough stable income to raise a family.
Should the group, who by and large, has contributed more to the society not have proportionally more say?
1) They haven't and 2) no. You appear to be advocating plutocracy.