Except this is not the age of the Rockefellers or the Carnegies, who, despite being far more philanthropic than modern-day billionaires, drew ire from every corner of society for their wealth accumulation. It wasn't until the New Deal that the balance shifted.

Unconstrained accumulation of capital into the hands of the few without appropriate investment into labor is illiberal and incompatible with democracy and true freedom. Those of us who are capitalists see surplus value as a compromise to ensure good economic growth. The hidden subtext of that is that all the wealth accumulated needs to be re-allocated to serve not only capital enterprise, but the needs of society as a whole. It's hard to see the current system as appropriate for that given how blindly and wildly investments are made with no DD or going long, or no effort paid to the social or environmental opportunity costs of certain practices.

A lot of this comes down to the crippling of the SEC and FTC, but even then, investors cry and whine every time you suggest reworking the regs to inhibit some of the predatory practices common in this post-80s era of hypernormalization. Our current system does not resemble a healthy capitalist economy at all. It's rife with monopsony and monopolistic competition, inequality of opportunity, and a strained underclass that's responsible for our inverted population pyramid -- how can you have kids when we're so atomized and there is no village to help you? You can raise kids in a nuclear family if and only if you have enough money to do so. Otherwise, historically, people relied on their communities when raising children in less-than-ideal circumstances. Those communities are drying up.