I’ve been thinking a lot about wealth lately — how it’s made, who gets to keep it, and how we talk about it like it’s some moral scorecard. It’s weird how the richest people on Earth can either be seen as saviors or villains. One minute they’re pledging to give away their fortunes, the next they’re in headlines about exploitation, suicides at overseas factories, and loopholes in the tax code. Take Foxconn and the suicide nets. That story still gets passed around like a symbol of everything wrong with modern capitalism. But if you zoom out, stories like that only blow up because they’re rare — rare and disappointing. They remind us that behind the polished iPhones and quarterly reports are people. Real people, sometimes in systems that forget they’re human.
The System Isn’t Broken — It’s Working as Designed
We talk about greedy CEOs like they’re inherently bad people. But most of the time, they’re just doing what the system was built to reward: chasing profit. That’s literally their job. CEOs have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value. It’s not a moral role. It’s a financial one. That doesn’t excuse the damage done when ethics are ignored — but it does explain why certain decisions keep getting made. You can blame the player, but the game itself is tilted. And unless you change the rules, the same outcomes repeat. That said, I don’t think it’s all bleak. Some of the wealthiest people — the ones who’ve “won” this game — end up giving away huge parts of their fortunes. You can question the motives (legacy? ego?), but still: if someone makes billions and ends up donating most of it, that’s a net positive, right?
When the Market Self-Corrects (But Only Sometimes)
People also forget that companies do get punished for acting horribly. Maybe not always through the courts, but through the court of public opinion. Theranos. Enron. BP after the oil spill. Uber during its cultural reckoning. The stock drops. Customers leave. Trust collapses. It’s not perfect, but the market does self-correct — just slowly. Often only after people get hurt. That’s the part that stings.
Taxing the Rich Feels Right — But It’s Not That Simple
Here’s the thing I struggle with: I get why people say we should just tax the rich more. Emotionally, it makes sense. When you see someone buying their third yacht while others are working two jobs to survive, you want some kind of balance. But if we’re being honest, it’s not that simple. You can’t just crank up tax rates without thinking about how people respond. At a certain point, the system starts working against itself. That’s the idea behind the Laffer Curve — that there’s a tipping point where higher taxes lead to less revenue, not more, because the people being taxed start avoiding, hiding, or simply moving away. France tried this. They hiked taxes on the ultra-wealthy and watched business owners and top earners leave. The country didn’t become more equal. It just lost a chunk of its economic base. It’s like squeezing a sponge too hard — you don’t get more water, just less to work with.
The U.S. and China: Two Different Games
It’s also worth looking at how different countries play this out. In the U.S., the story is: build big, take risks, get rich. You’re free to succeed or fail — spectacularly. The downside? The safety net is thin. If you fall through the cracks, you fall hard. In China, it’s a different contract. You can build wealth, sure — but only within the boundaries the state sets. Step out of line, and the entire platform you’ve built can vanish overnight. Just ask Jack Ma. Success is tolerated — until it threatens control. Neither system is perfect. One favors innovation and chaos. The other favors order and control. But both tell you something important: every economy is just a set of trade-offs. So the question becomes, what kind of trade-offs are we okay with?
Redistribution vs. Pre-Distribution
I don’t think the answer is to punish the rich. But I do think we need to rethink how opportunity is distributed in the first place. Instead of just redistributing wealth after it’s been made, maybe the better move is pre-distribution — setting things up so more people have access to the tools and chances to succeed before the gap gets too wide. That means:
- Public education that actually competes with private schools
- Access to affordable housing, capital, and healthcare
- A culture that doesn’t just reward being born into the right ZIP code Because if we don’t invest in those things up front, we’ll be stuck playing catch-up forever.
Greed Isn’t the Problem. Direction Is.
Greed built skyscrapers. It also built monopolies. Greed put the internet in our pockets. It also put workers in warehouses without bathroom breaks. The difference is what we let greed aim at. If ambition is rewarded when it benefits others — not just shareholders — we get a better version of capitalism. A system that makes space for profit and progress. The goal shouldn’t be to kill ambition. It should be to channel it. To turn it into something more sustainable than a quarterly report. I think we’re heading toward something like Universal Basic Income eventually. Not because people are lazy, but because automation and consolidation are just outpacing the number of available, dignified jobs. At some point, giving people a financial floor becomes more efficient than patching holes in the system. And when that time comes, I hope we don’t just slap a Band-Aid on inequality. I hope we take a step back and rethink the whole blueprint — from how we measure value, to how we reward work, to what kind of society we actually want to live in. Because if we don’t ask those questions now, we’ll be stuck fixing symptoms instead of root causes. Thanks for reading. If this got you thinking — or pissed you off — that’s kind of the point. Feel free to drop a reply or share your take.