I'm of the opinion that billionaires are good for the economy. Wages in the US are about double what they are in the EU.
There are some aspects in which the EU provides a higher quality of life, but those have nothing to do with tax rates or the concentration of billionaires. They're more related to things like good city planning allowing for pedestrian and biking-friendly neighbourhoods (E.g. 50% of commutes to work in Copenhagen are by bike, where in the U.S. it's less than 1%.), old cohesive cultures, and better, more developed culinary traditions.
The billionaires here are just a scapegoat because the rent-seeking parties need a target that is naturally unsympathetic for the public to direct its anger toward. The National Education Association is the largest union in the US with three million members. 99% of its campaign contributions go to the Democrats. I haven't seen a single policy that it advocates that is actually good for society. If you look at the jurisdictions where the teachers' unions hold the most sway, they make the least efficient use of public money. New York spends three times more than Florida per pupil on public education and has slightly worse academic performance.
The investors don't manufacture those higher quality goods and services - their workers do. The investors collect economic rent from the worker's outputs.
The capital that the workers operate is an extension of the investor. The investor is an active participant making their capital available for the productive enterprise.
And if the investors collect economic rent from the workers' output, then the workers collect economic rent every time an investor hires them for a project in which the investor loses money.
But under the standard Economics definition of "economic rent", a positive investment return from a project in which a person risked investment capital and the worker provided labor in exchange for a guaranteed wage is not economic rent that was extracted by the investor.
