Because wealth is power. Wealth is influence. If you control the means of production you have a disproportionately large voice not in government but in society. Not everyone has Jeff Bezos' pen that can in one fell swoop dramatically alter the livelihoods of millions or bring cities and counties to their knees grovelling at his feet.
Irrespective of total overall wealth, the distribution of wealth is an indicator of who decides the future of the society in which that wealth exists. Today, 90% of Americans have as much wealth as the 1% at the top, which means 1% of people wield half of the influence of money in society, and money has an obscenely powerful influence on society.
Its why we get tax cuts and deficits. Why we don't have socialized medicine. Why our labor protections are lacking, why workers get so little mandatory paid time off. Its why stress is up, why working hours are up, why debt is up. Why housing is more expensive - the poor don't use housing as an investment the way the rich do, in the absence of floods of capital floating around for the exclusive purposes of making more money there is a much smaller market for domineering real estate markets so much that you buy out the local government to prevent building to drive up your property values.
"Bad" is subjective and binary. Let's talk thresholds.
As extremes, the floor is death from exposure/starvation and the ceiling is owning all the wealth available. Does it make sense to have a range this extreme? Some think so, but I think they are confusing this for meritocracy. I think it's ineffective and too closely mirrors nature, where one small mistake means perpetual agony or death.
Now the other extreme: the floor and the ceiling are the same. Everyone is paid one wage no matter the work they do. Everyone has a decent amount of comfort. Is this effective? Probably not, because if I get paid the same wage as someone who works half as hard as me, wouldn't I just work less? There's no incentive structure here.
So the rest is exploring areas somewhere in between. Does it make sense for someone to have the power and influence that $100B gives? Does that kind of concentration of economic power make sense? What if it was capped at $1B? Would having $1B be incentive enough to strive for success? What about $500M? What about $100M?
At what point do you say "ok, great job, you've managed to divert an insane amount of wealth to yourself, you won't be needing any more after that?" And the lower you set that level, the higher the floor raises. Is this fair? Debatable, obviously. Is it effective? Probably. Nobody is not going to start a megacorporation because "gee, I wanted to make $100B but I can only ever make $1B, so what's the point? I'll just work in a coffee shop instead."
Now imagine the floor: What if we could all own a house, car, have free tuition, and work 30 hours a week with plenty of time for vacations? In other words, what if we could actually live our lives without running on some endless, stressful treadmill for 45 years?
This isn't about "good" or "bad" but rather being mindful of how wealth is distributed and how it could look if it was done differently. Obviously, we're talking about purely-hypothetical scenarios, but that doesn't mean the ideas shouldn't be discussed.
- our democracy is not perfect, and allowing someone to become too wealthy affords them too much power, effectively disenfranchinsing the masses.
- Even if the floor is raising, its still too low and it would be better to squeeze those on the high side of the inequality in order to raise the floor even further.
- the social cohesion thing from the other comment.
