Communist/socialist/progressive friends saying billionaires shouldn’t exist. By nature of scale, billionaires are bound to exist. They will exist even without manipulating the market from the sheer size of the U.S. and structural advantages of market economics.

Should monopolies exist? Probably not unless they provide essentially the best service ever and no one else bothers funding anything to compete against it.

Sometimes, some things simply cannot exist without a large marketplace, and thus billionaires would have to exist. Without enough users on a marketplace, the market wouldn’t reach liquidity, and thus it would never be a good service. Even before considering if it’s a good service, without market liquidity, some things wouldn’t exist like Uber. Many things wouldn’t be cheap in a smaller marketplace; they can only be cheap when the market has reached liquidity, and someone is bound to profit (Craigslist is a fantastic example of simply first mover advantage making someone a billionaire through sheer luck). Some things are by network effects. Facebook for example is all about network effects; why use a different platform if everyone is on this one? Instagram and TikTok beat those monopolistic thinking by being a better service, oriented around different human behaviors.

A socialist might ask, should those marketplaces exist? If so, a communist might ask, should the government control it? To the socialist, those marketplaces are made to solve the problem of exchanging information as quickly as possible. The Internet made price competition more intense bringing the best deals in human history by making the markets more transparent. To the communist, governments shouldn’t control marketplaces, at least in the case of Craigslist (and their downstream niche competitors like GovDeals, Facebook Marketplace, Zillow, etc.). The reason is simple: the service can always get better. The government is not only poor at making their own decisions, but, in democratic systems, they are manipulated too easily by politics. One may point to China and say that their communist regime controls tons of sectors like dams. But China runs these like businesses; the metric that the CEOs of public projects, in this case dams, use is profit, because money is not capitalist in nature but a method of exchange. Profit is not capitalist in nature but a measure of efficiency; Japan and France’s public transit networks both use profit as a metric. Many progressives believe public transportation should be completely free, but, besides initial construction, maintenance and workers must be paid somehow. Who should pay is very easy: whoever receives value of that service. In the frame of NYC politics, taxing employers and billionaires doesn’t make sense if your workers don’t use the subway; most of the loudmouths are NYC transplants or socialists who believe the root of all evil is money, but many people in Queens and Brooklyn own cars or use busses. Someone needs to pay; if the billionaires extract value, then wages would increase if rent and fares are increasing.