Wealth created by producing something people want is not taken from anyone

The argument

The first objection is that the moral charge assumes a fixed quantity of wealth to be divided, when wealth can be created. Opponents argue that someone who builds a business supplying something people choose to buy has added to what exists rather than taken a larger share of it: the customers are better off by their own judgement, since they parted with money for something they preferred; the employees took the work in preference to the alternatives available to them; and the suppliers sold willingly. If every party to these exchanges is better off by their own estimation, it is unclear who has been wronged, and a theory of moral failing that cannot name a victim is doing something other than identifying one. Opponents argue that the size of the resulting fortune reflects the scale of the exchange rather than the severity of any extraction. A small margin on an enormous number of voluntary transactions produces a very large sum, and the largeness is a measure of how many people found the thing worth buying. On this view a fortune of that magnitude is evidence of having supplied something very widely wanted, and treating the magnitude itself as a moral indictment inverts the relationship between benefit conferred and censure received. Opponents accept that fortunes can also be built on fraud, monopoly, coercion, political favour or externalised harm, and they do not defend those. Their point is that these are distinct charges, each requiring evidence, and each already the subject of law. The claim that being a billionaire is as such a moral failing dispenses with that evidence by treating the quantity as the offence, which makes moral assessment easier at the cost of making it useless, since it convicts the person who built something valuable on exactly the same terms as the person who stole.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Proponents of the charge argue that the voluntariness of the exchanges is doing too much work. An employee who takes the best job available in a labour market with few alternatives has agreed rather than chosen freely, and a customer buying from a firm with no real competitor is in a similar position; calling both outcomes mutually beneficial describes the form of the transaction rather than the balance of power within it. They also argue that creation and capture are not alternatives but typically combined, so showing that something was built does not show that the share retained was proportionate. And they maintain that the argument never addresses retention: whatever one concludes about how a fortune arose, the decision to keep it while it could relieve serious harm is a separate choice this reasoning leaves untouched.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That wealth can be created does not show that any particular fortune was created rather than captured from a collective product. [Rejecting P2] Consent given in a market with few alternatives is agreement under constraint, so mutual benefit describes the form of the exchange rather than the balance of power. [Rejecting P3] Creation and capture are typically combined, so separating the charges allows the proportion retained to escape assessment altogether. [Rejecting C] The argument addresses how the fortune arose and leaves the decision to retain it entirely unexamined.