Tom’s Tidbits- What’s wrong with billionaires? Maybe this…

Greetings,

A fairly Libertarian friend of mine once asked me, in all seriousness, why I thought billionaires were a problem. As he said, we’ve always had rich people… why should the size of the wealth matter? Shouldn’t everyone be allowed to get as rich as they want to get? Is the only reason I don’t like billionaires that I don’t like billionaires? Of course, I don’t think it’s an unreasoning hatred, I think there are real, specific reasons why billionaires are problematic. Billionaire-ism seems almost like a form of hoarding or mental illness, so that’s one reason to dislike (or at least limit) them. Such a small number of people controlling massive wealth when millions of people scrape by seems like an assault on basic human fairness. Concentrated power is a threat to any egalitarian society, much less the individuals in it. I couldn’t boil all these reasons down to a pithy response at the time, though, so the question’s lingered for me. Some recent stories sharpened my thoughts enough that I may finally have the pithy answer I wanted.

You’ve heard the stories I’m thinking of… at SCOTUS, a billionaire with multiple cases before the court showered hundreds of thousands of dollars on a Justice, while in Ukraine Elon Musk decided to cut the critical technology Ukraine needed to attack its invader. There’s no shortage of stories like these, but these two crystallized the problem with billionaires for me … that much money concentrates too much power in the hands of too few people.

We get numb to how big a billion is. Killing and eating just one billionaire would make 1000 millionaires. Break those down and you get 10,000 $100,000 checks. $100,000 can be a life-changing amount of money to we commoners, but a billion dollars to someone who has 2 billion or more? A 50% loss of income would be a huge hit, but wouldn’t impact the lifestyle of a billionaire at all.

Wealth is more than metaphorical power, it’s actual power to make the changes you want to see in the world. Good or bad. Money buys corruption AND justice, violence AND harmony, education AND propaganda. A billion held by 1000 people goes in 1000 different directions; if held by a government goes in a few directions authorized by the governed. With a billionaire it goes wherever that one person says it does. A billion dollars lets Bill Gates create vaccines or George Soros promote human rights, but the same billion lets Rupert Murdoch create his media sludge pump, or Charles and David Koch deny climate change, or Barry Seid overturn your right to abortion. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a few billionaire puts us all at the mercy their ethics and priorities… whatever those ethics and priorities may be.

Most billionaires these days seem most comfortable putting their wealth into politics. It’s a smart investment, too. A million dollars is a pittance to them, but it unlocks billions more in tax laws, environmental regulations, labor standards, and more. Just twelve billionaires spent one out of every 13 dollars given to candidates or political groups from 2009 to 2020. In the 2020 cycle, billionaires contributed almost one out of every 10 dollars in federal campaigns, and billionaire spending in the 2022 midterms was up 44% compared to 2018. A single billionaire is a threat to democracy, but billionaires in concert are an oligarchy that kills it.

There aren’t many ways to defang a billionaire (which is another problem with them). Wealth is power, and since Citizens United decided money is the same as political speech billionaires have incredible power to defend their wealth. Incredible, but not unlimited. The only way to cripple a billionaire is to reduce their wealth, and the only (reasonable) way to do that is to TAX THEM! TAX WEALTH! The tax rate on the richest from 1944 to 1963 was over 90%, with a peak of 94% in 1944. That, or an even higher rate, may be necessary to pull our democracy back from their clutches. Whatever the number, they MUST be taxed at a rate that makes it very, very difficult to become a billionaire at all! And then unwind the labor, tax, and other laws that let them plunder the wealth of the Middle Class.

“Wealth in and of itself is not problematic,” writes Darrel West in “Billionaires, Reflections on the Upper Crust”. (see our Book Spotlight this month.) “It is how rich people convert financial might into political power for their own benefit that creates problems.” That boils down even further to the pithy answer I was looking for- Billionaires put too much power into two few hands.

Make a great day,