Pure trickle-down had it's day too, but it's it's a joke again in modern times, for the most part. You may object that these are all weak arguments, but basically, you and what army?

Edit: "We need a remote chance of becoming a billionaire for anyone to go to work" is kind of a blend of trickle-down and argument number one, but I suppose I should mention it, just for the sake of completeness

[–] friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I guess even as a billionaire, the difference between your first 50 billion and your second 50 billion is that with your second you can make frivolous purchases of social media companies without going back to being poor.

It's still bullshit in the big picture of history.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yeah, it's a continuous scale, which is something people miss sometimes. When you talk to people with millions of dollars they have a tendency to say they're not that rich, and point to some guy they know with tens of millions. They're not wrong per se even if they're dangerously out of touch; that extra digit changes a lot.

The bullshit is just that that scale goes way, way too high, as well as way too low. Human ability is normally distributed, and human worth is often held to be inalienably equal. Wealth follows a completely different distribution, for reasons.