i don’t think you can. money is power — that’s really all it is. you can’t eat it, but you can use it to get other people to surrender food to you. no matter what you do with say campaign finance law, i don’t think you can stop billionaires from influencing media, academia, etc to shape politics. 1/

that’s not to say we shouldn’t try to improve campaign finance laws. they can help at the margin. but they won’t be enough while billionaire “philanthropy” also shapes endowed chairs in, say, economics, and a thousand other levers that affect how we collectively think and understand. /fin

you are not taking it too literally. it's meant literally. there's nothing wrong with a professional athlete. there's a lot wrong with they or anyone accumulating 100s of M of dollars. the tax system should make that impossible to sustain. 1/

more than any particular good and service, we want to live in a democracy with meaningful political equality. when people have levels of wealth in the 100s of millions or billions, there is no meaningful political equality. 2/

for very little personal sacrifice or risk, such people can have extraordinary influence over our polity. the cost of that is much more serious than any incentive effect on the few individuals who might see their upside clipped. 3/

if we established a decent tax system, we'd compress the income and wealth distribution, such that only people at the very top of class achieved anything near the (soft) cap. the upper tail of the bell curve would be much slimmer. 4/

people who get off on competing for relative wealth, could still do so, but they'd do so at smaller numbers. they'd still be fabulously rich and live lives of great luxury. but their games couldn't put them in a position to control our politics. 5/

perhaps you might argue there are some people who are so extraordinary they'd get to the point where the tax system renders it difficult to become richer, and just quit. there might be. 6/

most extraordinary people will continue to work when pure financial incentives wane, for excellence, prestige, fame. purely mercenary people tend not in fact to be extraordinary excellences. 7/

but tend doesn't mean none. undoubtedly there will be some few extraordinary people who "Atlas Shrug" when they can't understand their work as being for the money, or for the increment of power and status that comes with the money. 8/

that's a cost. but not a very great one. we tend to overstate the uniqueness of talent. 9/

there's a kind of incumbency bias that works in favor of those already revealed to be extraordinary, but there is usually a deep bench of equivalent or even greater talents who could fill their shoes if they abandon them. 10/

if Atlas wants to shrug, he or she can. that may exact some social cost, but it will also yield some benefit in making space for more extraordinary talents to enjoy success. 11/

the net cost will be far loss than the cost exacted on us by stratifying into such differences in wealth and power that the rich become effectively a ruling class. 12/

as i hope more people can understand right now, that cost can be existential, is orders of magnitude larger than the loss if a small number athletic talents or entrepreneurs choose to shirk if they are not offered gargantuan carrots. /fin