Writing about Musk’s newly minted status at her magazine The Argument, for example, liberal pundit Jerusalem Demsas articulates the position that inequality is of little consequence as long as everyone has a decent standard of living. For Demsas, Musk being a trillionaire isn’t really that big of a deal in its own right. “I just don’t think inequality is that related to the central problems facing society,” she writes, urging us to care about the floor and not the ceiling.

Demsas flatly asserts that “gaps between people, absent material deprivation,” are “simply not a moral problem.” This is a position philosophers call “sufficientarianism.” The idea is that, as long as everyone has enough, it doesn’t matter how much more anyone else has. If “everyone in the world had access to a decent standard of living, but some people were quadrillionaires,” Demsas writes, this would be fine. By contrast, “a world without much inequality but significant deprivation” would be quite bad, and this is exactly how things were for “most of human history when most people lived in subsistence agrarian economies.”

Demsas assumes a moral zero-sum choice between caring about the height of the floor and caring about the gap between the floor and the ceiling. But we can and should care about both.

First of all, the two issues may be distinct in the abstract, but they’re highly interrelated in real life. The political influence of oligarchs like Musk clearly has something to do with America’s tragically underdeveloped welfare state — which is so neglected that, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, we still don’t have national health insurance. More generally, the more wealth and power we let people have on the ceiling, the less hope we have of politics that benefit anyone anywhere near the floor.

Second, even if we could somehow disentangle these things, we should question her assumption that only deprivation matters and fairness is irrelevant. Imagine a world where everyone had whatever you would personally consider to be “enough.” Now imagine that all the black people in this world stayed at “enough” while all the white people were raised to a vastly higher level. Presumably liberals like Demsas would (quite rightly) find this maddeningly unfair, on the grounds that an arbitrary factor like skin color shouldn’t make a difference to anyone’s life outcome. The problem is that exactly the same reasoning should apply to inequalities that stem from, for example, some people being born into the working class and others being born as the heirs to vast fortunes.

It’s one thing to argue that we have to swallow some degree of inequality as a price for a thriving economy — though the burden of proof should be on anyone who thinks we can’t make massive strides toward equality while keeping the floor at an acceptable level. It’s quite another to say that inequality so extreme that it gives us trillionaires doesn’t matter at all.

If the floor is set so low that some people lack medical care or clean drinking water, liberals can acknowledge the presence of an injustice and go to work thinking about what kind of technocratic tinkering would alleviate it. But where socialists think that a wildly unequal distribution of wealth (and hence economic power) is also outrageous, the ideological blind spots of pro-capitalist liberals like Demsas make it hard for them to see any problem at all.

Saying that both considerations matter isn’t some novel attempt to have it both ways. It’s the traditional socialist position. There’s a reason that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels spend the opening pages of the Communist Manifesto rhapsodizing about the effectiveness of capitalism in building up the machinery of an advanced global economy. They didn’t want to retreat to a world of subsistence farming, but they also didn’t think we needed to learn to live with capitalist inequality. Instead, they thought that the way capitalism supercharged global economic development created the possibility, for the first time in history, of moving toward a postcapitalist world that would be better than either one. This vision remains the socialist North Star.

If workers and the larger communities they’re part of collectively and democratically ran their own workplaces and decided how to distribute the product of their collective labor, we might not all end up with precisely the same incomes. Some people might need to be tempted with higher salaries to accept coordinating positions involving lots of stress and responsibility, or to accept particularly dirty and dangerous jobs no one wants to do. What we wouldn’t have is inequality based on a roll of the dice, which spirals so far out of control that we have to add new words like “trillionaire” to our collective vocabulary.