That's one of the questions The New York Times recently put to the avalanche of candidates coming for the Democratic party's presidential nomination in 2020.
A few of them, and not necessarily the most left-wing ones, offered a squishily-philosophic no. "I'm not sure anybody cosmically or morally deserves to have a billion dollars," as South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg put it. Others were more positive: John Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado, thinks the aspiration to make a billion dollars "drives a lot of our economy." One thing just about everyone agreed on was that the existence of billionaires is offensive in the context of a society also beset by inequality, poverty and deprivation of opportunity. "It's a question that isn't meaningful outside its moorings," as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) put it.
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