To be sure, capitalism is a lot of industriousness and intelligence, but it’s a lot of dumb luck too, being at the right place/time.
If Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg had’ve been struck by lightning before becoming billionaires, someone would’ve come along with about as good a product, perhaps even better months, maybe even just weeks later to fill that niche, but because they weren’t, Bill, Jeff and Mark are billionaires, and their former competitors, about as industrious and intelligent as they are, may only be middle or even working class.
It’s because of how modern free markets works, with intellectual property and mass production.
If something’s first, the best or one of, it spreads everywhere, and a handful of families end up controlling a sector of the economy, even tho they may only be a little better at what they do.
And they just get better and better at what they do, buying up the competition and hiring more and more people who’re good at what they do.
It’ll be next to impossible to meaningfully compete with them.
It’s a casino economy, winner takes all, losers get nothing or scraps.
Even some libertarians argue intellectual property is a violation of our rights.
Some individualists argue property that’s never been or couldn’t possibly be routinely physically occupied or used by the owner should be considered abandoned, up for grabs, even if they pay taxes on it.
Now, we don’t have to take it that far, but in exchange for permitting the existence of intellectual property, a social construct, a coercive monopolization (copying what people do is not a forceful, fraudulent or violent act), the property should partly belong to us all i.e. social corporatism.
Bill Gates may be superior to the vast majority of workers, but is he really millions of times superior?
Is he God?
No, but he’s millions of times wealthier, so wealth is not necessarily an accurate representation of value.
I’m not claiming all individuals are equal, I’m not saying all classes are equal.
It’s impossible for anyone or anything to be equal.
The working class are more beneficially productive than the underclass, the lower middle class, when taken as a whole, are probably more beneficially productive than the working class, the middle class more than the lower middle and so on, but once you become upper class, the richest 1%, or the overclass, the richest 1 10th of 1%, arguably things tend to get screwy, and wealth is no longer a reliable measure of a person’s value.