The hero plan, or some bullshit like that

I've been talking with friends at work about the horrors of capitalism, as you do, and we have come to the agreement that billionaires are awful and shouldn't be allowed to exist in the current form. Now obviously we have no power to make that happen unless we can get one alone in a dark alley or something, but we did get to thinking about how we'd go about dealing with them if we somehow had the power to do so. One guy said he'd just make it straight up illegal to have so much money, that after a billion dollars in assets the rest just goes straight to the government, I approve of this but I came up with something I think is better.

I've said before that the best argument against the libertarian idea that the rich will fix everything if only the government would get out of their way is that the rich have not in fact fixed anything and never will, their so called charitable works even are mostly just ways to spend other people's money. But I got to thinking what if we made them do it? I call it the Bruce Wayne initiative, or the hero plan, or With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.

The way it would work is like so: Person accrues assets (Cash+properties+investments, stocks, etc.) of over a billion dollars. This person is immediately exempt from all taxes while they have this much money, but in return they are assigned a problem to fix, they have a year to present a plan, and then three years to show meaningful progress on the plan, if they do not meet those requirements they are retroactively taxed a punitive amount, like 80% of their income or something, whatever it takes to get them down below billionaire status. What kind of problems would they be fixing? Whatever we've got, maybe they are assigned a state and are told to fix it's homelessness problem, or told to figure out how to put out the Amazon fires, or to protect an endangered species, fix an underperforming school district, create a treatment for cancer, things of that nature.

They are given free reign to do it, the only stipulations being they can't break major laws including labor laws, they have to solve the problem in spirit as well as by the letter of the law(no ending homelessness in Oregon by shipping all the homeless people to California for example), and they can't get financial assistance from anyone other than billionaires.

Other than that, the government gets out of their way and they can be a hero who saves lives or whatever.

Now obviously this would need a lot of work to keep people from dodging it, a rigorous accounting of assets would be required to keep people from hiding shit to avoid their responsibilities, as well as some way to monitor progress and assess results, essentially we'd need a government agency dedicated to the whole thing, but I think it would be cool.

Billionaires are not like you and I, but they want us to think they are so let's make them prove it. Prove they can be more than a dragon hoarding wealth. If you give me a couple billion bucks and told me to figure out how to end homelessness in Oregon I bet you anything I could do it even if it came down to buying a home for each person in the state, they want us to believe they earned their money through their hard work and brilliance, they can prove that too, by actually doing something good for a change, hell under my plan there is nothing stopping them from making money off their assignments if they can, or from following other business opportunities in the meantime, all they have to do is deal with this problem. If it scares them away? Fuck em the country doesn't need them, if it keeps people from becoming billionaires in the first place? Great that means money and assets are moving around and helping the economy in other ways, and everyone is paying taxes. If it works as designed? Then maybe we get to see a real life Tony Stark do some good for once.