Exactly so. It is quite difficult to come up with a wealthy non-state actor who's wreaked the same sort of havoc as a Hitler or Mao. Let alone even relatively minor players on the international stage who're responsible for billions to trillions in actual damages to people's living standards.
The typical complaint against billionaires is stuff like their yacht is too big or people don't like one policy they took advantage of. It isn't really to the same scale. At their worst, wealthy non-state actors lobby powerful figures in government to act.
> The sort of havoc Mao wreaked made the greatest state in the world in 2025 by any capitalist measure.
Not in terms of the general welfare. If the question is "which peoples have the most money" the leaderboards are still dominated by historically capitalist economies in the US and Europe. Its true that China's trajectory is much more promising and their industrial policy has the west licked (although I argue mainly because the west has banned industry more than because China is some paragon of efficiency). But they started a long way behind because the west mainly relied on wealthy inter-state actors and the Chinese were burdened with a remarkably strong civic leader named Mao.
> All we get with this agreement is stability
No; the deal is massive wealth creation and rapid improvements in material prosperity. It is all driven by factories, and the thing that comes with factories is factory owners. Every time people tried factories without factory owners it ended poorly. The west is running a deindustrialisation experiment and it doesn't look like a winner to me either. I wish we'd leave the experimenting to 3rd parties instead of let China experiment with capitalism while we go off into the economic never-never.
More factories -> more stuff is the basic correlation to keep an eye on. Factory owners are going to be a part of that too; they're probably going to be obscenely well off. I support it. The important thing is rewarding the people who build and run factories.
The typical complaint against billionaires is stuff like their yacht is too big or people don't like one policy they took advantage of. It isn't really to the same scale. At their worst, wealthy non-state actors lobby powerful figures in government to act.