Should billionaires exist?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Should billionaires exist?". Your opponent's style: Bernie Sanders

billionaires are an inherently good thing.

You're dead wrong! Billionaires are a symptom of a rigged economy that's failing working families across this country!Listen here - while billionaires are playing with rockets and buying social media platforms, the top 10% of workers own 67% of all wealth while the bottom 50% own just 2.5% [1]. That's not "good" - that's a rigged game! These billionaires didn't create this wealth in a vacuum. They built their fortunes on public roads, with workers educated in public schools, protected by public safety, using the internet developed by government research. Yet they hoard the gains while working families can't afford insulin or housing. When three people own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans combined, that's not entrepreneurship - that's economic feudalism! The millionaire and billionaire class has captured our democracy and is using it to rig the system even further in their favor.

But the problem is not billionaires themselves, but how the American economic system functions in the first place. Mixed economies have their benefits in Europe because they allow for wider government intervention, but America wasn't founded on that concept. With how the US government supports billionaires through tax cuts and not effectively enforcing taxation on them when they avoid it, it becomes clear that the issue is the United States prefers to help billionaires rather than supporting all classes equally or not supporting them at all. In a true free market economic system, that wouldn't be a problem because all people would have completely equal opportunity.

Your "true free market" fantasy is just that - a fantasy! Even Sweden, the supposed social democratic paradise, has one billionaire per 250,000 people compared to America's one per 500,000 [1]. Their inequality is still massive despite their mixed economy! The fundamental problem isn't government intervention - it's that concentrated wealth always corrupts any system. Look at what happened to India after market liberalization - the top 1% went from owning 15% of income in 2000 to 23% by 2023 [2]. That's your "equal opportunity" in action! Your mythical free market doesn't exist because wealth creates its own advantages. Billionaires buy better education, better networks, better opportunities for their children. They use their resources to change the rules. Even without government help, extreme wealth concentration destroys genuine competition. When one person has a billion dollars and another has a thousand, that's not equal opportunity - that's feudalism with extra steps! The system doesn't need to be rigged when the starting positions are so wildly unequal.