No. But it is a slippery slope of having limits on people, from wealth to anything you can think of (random example: limit ownership to a single car). In the end if it is all legal, it is nobody else's business. If it is illegal, setting an upper limit is not the moral solution.
Where $1 billion is about 40,000 Honda Civics, I think most people would support limiting ownership of cars to 39,999. It doesn't even have to be a hard limit, just a luxury tax on cars that cost more than, say, $1 million, and on owning more than 40,000 cars. If you want a 40,001st car, your can do it but it means you're going to have to pay an extra fee that goes towards helping people with less.
"most people would support" is mob rule or tyranny of the majority. Not morally right. People have no right to tell you how many cars (or something else) you are allowed to own.
how many slaves do you own, how much cocaine do you own, how many guns do you own? how many crocodiles or tigers can I keep as a pet? there are lots of limits on what I can own
You can make just about anything a slippery slope if you wanted to - “they’re putting limits on guns, what’s next, kitchen knives?”
Morally you should probably be spending more time figuring out how to get everyone their first car instead of worrying about your legal rights in owning your second.
Why yes, there are countries with limits on kitchen knives.
And if your focus is on providing that first car, then the system currently doing that en masse for billions of previously-poor people is called “capitalism” and your moral imperative is to speed it up, not slow it down.
Capitalism only works when you have a middle class. Protecting billionaires’ abilities to hoard wealth is not in the interests of the middle class.
To be charitable I’ll point out that in general that’s not what you’re arguing for. There is a real sense in which personal freedom is essential to people making it out of poverty. Protecting one person’s and not another’s would defeat the point.
Here is the compromise. It should be easy for people to do things that billionaires would have no point doing (i.e. take out a business loan of $10K) and difficult for billionaires to do things that people would have difficulty doing (hoard the global supply of some good). That’s if your goal is to have an equitable society where everyone is on the same difficulty level, more or less.
Approached this way there would not be a slippery slope because the delineation is quite clear. Moreover there’s no squashing of personal freedom, a billionaire is always free to do things a regular person is able to do. In fact the system we have now basically squashes the freedom of the average person because they are not free to do things (buy a house, have a chance in court) by virtue of not having money while other people have a ton.
"Capitalism only works when you have a middle class" - I never saw a scientific demonstration of this. It is always in the "everyone knows" fallacy class of statements pulled out of the landing gear.
well, see, it's embarrassing to admit, but you see, I'm a billionaire. I mean, I'm not one right now, it's a temporary thing. Once I'm back on my feet, I'll have a billion dollars and then, see, I just couldn't have restrictions like that placed on me. I think everyone should be able to get that. So even though it's hurting me now that the rich don't get taxed more, it's just this temporary embarrassing thing where I'm not currently a billionaire.
