What makes you think everyone's opinion is equally important in the economy? Some people do more important things than others, and thus their decisions must be weighted higher. Otherwise, inefficiency would be created.

>...which ends up not being very different at all to communism in this regard. Your billionaires become your central planners. Except they're not even trying to make good decisions for other people in most cases.

If we're talking about billionaires who get rich through honest business, then they are by definition great planners who are bestowed money through satisfying the needs of many people. They can lose their money. They also only do part of the planning... Most of the decisions about what ought to be valuable are made by all the other participants in the economy. The billionaires are just the tip of the spear when it comes to actually doing big picture stuff.

>Now, granted, power in western democracies in 2025 is less centralised than it was in soviet Russia, but it's a hell of a lot more centralised than it was in the 70s and 80s. And currently it's only getting worse.

Western countries have been outsourcing manufacturing and automating everything which destroys jobs for short-term gains. It's not exactly the work of billionaires. It is more like a failure of people at every level to choose their countries over profits. Protectionism is one market inefficiency that I think we need.