Then again, Mr. Jobs is a billionaire several times over. I suppose he has it coming.

See, you could set the rules in such a way that they would discourage companies from growing too big, from taking large share of the market, etc.; reflecting a more classical model of capitalism. Then (if this is at all possible) you wouldn’t have any billionaires, but the rest of us would’ve been better off.

Alternatively, you could relax the rules even more and create even bigger conglomerates, destroy the environment, etc.

This all can be tuned, nothing is god-given.

And how in the world could you be massively successful as a retailer, WITHOUT “destroying small retail businesses”? Got news for you, abb1; Destroying a business by out-competing it is PART of a functioning market, not a malfunction.

As for your anecdotes, keep piling them up. I have no objection to proving that particular people got wealthy by illegitimate means, what I object to is the assumption that if somebody is wealthy, they MUST have used illegitimate means to get that way.

Look, take the top 2 fellas on the list. They initially built their software empire by getting an exclusive agreement with monopolistic PC manufacturer. They are responsible for massive abuse of monopoly power, bullying, destroying talent everywhere, sabotaging good products (i.e. ‘polluted java’) – these are facts.

I am sure all the living children of Walmart founder are among the top 100. Walmart is a business that’s not only responsible for destroying millions of small retail businesses, but also for ruthless exploitation both inside and outside the US.

How’s that for an anecdote? These are methods rewarded by the economic system to unimaginable degree. How can it be a good thing, how does it help you and me?

What about James Dyson? Lone whacko, new type of vaccum cleaner, perhaps not a billionaire but certainly half one in sterling. Beat off a patent challenge from (Hoover? Electrolux?) as well.

If SH is right, we’d have to think hard about whether income inequality is really a “problem”, wouldn’t we?

Coming in late, sort of in defense of SH—answering your “So what?” in #161. (I was recommended some literature that was fairly explicit on this point when I wrote major paper on inequality transmission, but that was years ago.)

Here’s the problem: “most of the income gains are accruing to a group that is small and largely static.” Most people—certainly most non-statisticians—are going to assume that the gains are going to the group in some sort of evenly distributed fashion. But what can be happening is that only the non-static portion of the group is experiencing any gains—only the entrants (entreprenuers) are gaining, and the static portion of the group has static income.

That’s one of the known, large problems with studies of income inequality—that they are not always clearly translatable from groups to individuals. (Classic example—suppose everyone gets $1 million at age 60, and has steadily rising, but fairly low, income and wealth to that point; all the high earners will be relatively wealthy, but wealth will not predict likelihood of someday being a high earner at all.)

And yes, if one large company gets a hold on an important patent, then we have a problem, as we do now with pharmaceuticals.

More or less by definition. Your complaint is with the copyright clause,

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

Apparently you don’t LIKE the idea of promoting Progress of Science and useful Arts, in as much as you want Authors and Inventors to get only the same reward as the people who copy their creations without having played any part in originating them…