I’m a supporter of capitalism, too. I run a small business for many years and have a great life as a result of my success.

I don’t think even a multi-million dollar yacht is a excessive. A $500 million dollar yacht (Bezos) when his delivery employees have to pee in bottles and shit in bags to make their schedules and not get fired is fucking obscene.

Luxury goods, like oligarchs, are a bad use of resources. The poor and working class spend 100–105% of every additional dollar they are paid. The very rich spend 5% or less (many studies confirm this). The velocity of money is winding down as a result of too much money in too few hands.

Luxury goods don’t spread money better than non-luxury goods. Oceanco, the company building Bezos’ $500 million yacht, employs 22 people.

I don’t know boats, but I do know cars. A Bugatti Chiron will set you back about $4 million. A VW Passat, about $40k. Bugatti has 500 employees. VW about 650,000. A hundred people buying a $40k Passat helps the economy massively more than 1 person buying a $4 million Bugatti.

Back to oligarchs. Bezos, as I noted, could give each one of his roughly 900k employees $100k and STILL have as much money as he had at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. 900,000 people buying cars, houses, little sailboats, taking vacations pumps enormous amounts of money into the economy. The millions of people supporting those 900,000 people spending $100k versus dozens or hundreds helping Jeff take his brother into low earth orbit.

It makes a huge difference whether there is 1, 10, or 10,000 people making decisions. In countries like Germany and Austria, if a company gets large enough, they MUST have a 1/3 or more board seats held by worker’s reps. So it never gets to the “shitting in bags” stage for companies here. And guess what? Amazon still makes money. Just not such obscene amounts of it.