1) Rich people not frivolously wasting enough of their wealth doesn't undermine economies;
2) The unwashed masses will never rise up against their uhpressors;
3) Rich people don't have some magical collective which solves the collective action problem; they act in their own interests on an individual basis, just like everybody else;
4) In the current regime, wealth is not power;
5) "Less" money, "fewer" dollars; one is continuous, the other discrete;
6) Nuclear is way cool, but coal isn't going to kill the planet;
7) The rich didn't get rich by frivolously buying everything they could possibly want, they got rich by saving and investing the vast majority of dollars that ever passed through their possession.
1. Megaprojects are not necessarily frivolous. Eradicating malaria, for instance, is not frivolous; it improves the lives of every human living on this planet. Bill Gates has my gratitude for even making the attempt possible.
2. History disagrees with you. Countries occasionally experience revolutions wherein the lower class murders a significant portion of the upper class (only to promote their own into the same social positions, whereupon they adopt similar behaviors). The unwashed masses may never exist long without a perfumed and shaved upper class, but they can certainly put a lot of bodies in the ground when they get the itch. For instance, look at the French Terror, or the Russian revolution, or the Khmer Rouge killing fields, or the Iranian revolution, or the Cuban revolution. Eating the rich tends to set back economic development by a decade or more, but that doesn't stop the lower classes from doing it.
3. Which is why there will be a lot of free riders on the coattails of those public figures that choose to pursue philanthropic projects. I'm sure that many of them lie about anonymously donating to charities.
4. Wealth and power are not equal, but they do have an exchange rate.
5. Thank you for the grammar reminder. Were you correcting someone upthread, or just mentioning it in case someone might get it wrong later?
6. Coal-burning won't kill the planet--it will just kill some of the humans on it, and maybe some unfortunate plants and animals that happen to live downwind or downstream from industrial zones. I still haven't forgotten the TVA Kingston ash slurry spill. I'm also inclined to believe that excessive burning of hydrocarbons for energy could trigger outgassing of polar methane clathrates, which would be an ecological disaster. It won't cause human extinction, but it will crater the global economy.
7. Is wealth a means to an end, or an end in itself? Of what use to the rest of humanity is the man who hoards without end, who fills warehouses to the brim and locks them away, never to be emptied? I don't care how the rich got rich. It doesn't matter to me whether they pulled themselves up out of the gutter by their own bootstraps, or whether they were lucky enough to be born rich. I only care about what you do with what you have.
2) The unwashed masses will never rise up against their uhpressors;
3) Rich people don't have some magical collective which solves the collective action problem; they act in their own interests on an individual basis, just like everybody else;
4) In the current regime, wealth is not power;
5) "Less" money, "fewer" dollars; one is continuous, the other discrete;
6) Nuclear is way cool, but coal isn't going to kill the planet;
7) The rich didn't get rich by frivolously buying everything they could possibly want, they got rich by saving and investing the vast majority of dollars that ever passed through their possession.