Extreme wealth is indefensible

What is difficult to understand about those who make millions of dollars a year is why they ever need that kind of money for? Who could ever use that much? What are they even spending it on? Why do they actually want it?

• These people live like monarchs. They live in almost ludicrous luxurious excess.They make no effort to curb their consumption. 
• When they want something, like a piece of designer clothing or a fancy dinner, they simply buy it. An expensive meal does not require an occasion. If the family wants to go out to a pricey restaurant, they just do it.
• They don’t have to do household chores. Everything is taken care of by the housekeeper, gardener, housemaid, driver etc. It is difficult to fathom living like this.
• Yet most of their income still just gets tossed into their savings account. This is truly extraordinary. 
• Whether increased taxes on the wealthy will have useful consequences is arguable. What is unimaginable is that increased taxation would deprive these people in any serious way.
• These people donating to charities may not exceed 1% of their annual income. It’s almost as if they care far more about feeling like they are charitable than actually being charitable.
• They rarely encounter criticism for the moral aspects of this kind of life. In wealthy circles, everyone has a strong interest in allowing each other to feel like they are good people. So if one person mentions about their donating to charities, the friend is unlikely to criticize. Rarely do elites tell other elites that it is wrong to be an elite, for obvious reasons. 
• And the most contact this person has with the working class probably comes during chance encounters with the pool man, who is unlikely to voice any judgment he may secretly hold about their decadent bourgeois habits.
• Even $400,000 annually is far too much to live on. It is very difficult to even grasp the amount of money possessed by the 20 people who own more than half the country’s wealth. If it takes a lot of effort to fritter away $400,000 each year, imagine how the billionaires struggle to think of things to buy. That’s why their spending becomes outright ludicrous. Once you go past the first million, there’s not really much more pleasure you can buy, so you have to resort to nonsense.
• The tax policy implications are debatable. But it’s uncontroversial to conclude that the possession of enormous wealth, especially in a time of great suffering, is just indefensible in every way. Even $400,000 a year provides enough to live in extreme luxury. Anything over that is just obscene. 
• Risk-taking investors deserve higher returns, but actual returns do not necessarily reflect merit. The determining quality of  billionaires is to be lucky -- the other qualities being necessary but not sufficient. And luck is not meritocratic.

Inequality does not cause poverty. Capitalism has resulted in much more economic inequality in China, but much less poverty. Studies have shown that lower taxes for the wealthy don't necessarily result in increased economic growth. Extreme wealth contributing to inequality were seen as irrelevant and a prerequisite for the growth that would also help the poorest, as the wealth created trickled down to the benefit of everyone. But rather than creating jobs and lifting others out of poverty super-rich minorities cause social unrest and depress demand for goods and services, limiting growth and innovation as a result. Extreme wealth causes extreme inequality that impedes poverty alleviation, slows economic growth, compounds gender inequality, drives inequality in health and education outcomes, undermines economic mobility over generations, fuels crime, undermines social cohesion, and harms democracy.

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That man is rich, whose pleasures are the cheapest ... Henry David Thoreau
Honesty is incompatible with amassing a large fortune ... Mahatma Gandhi 

At least 50% of the world’s billionaire wealth is non-meritocratic owing to either inheritance or a high presumption of cronyism. Another 15% is not meritocratic owing to presumption of monopoly. All of it is non-meritocratic owing to globalization. By contrast, crime and technology are found to be negligible sources of extreme wealth. The argument that "These eight billionaires, through the salaries and stock paid to their employees and the stock owned by millions of shareholders, have made millions of people rich and improved the lives of billions of people through the use of their products. They have not made anybody poor." is fine but governments must tax them at higher tax rates and spend the proceeds for accelerating eradication of poverty. These billionaires have a greater obligation for contributing for this cause.