Thought Shrapnel

I don’t really understand people who look at billionaires as anything other than an aberration of the system. They are not, in any way, people to be looked up to, imitated, or praised.

What probably makes it easier for me is that I see pretty much every form of hierarchical organisation-for-profit as something to be avoided. The CEO who employs downward pressure on wages, resists unionisation, and enjoys the fruits of other people’s labour, is merely different in terms of scale.

If multi-millionaires exist out of the normal cycle of everyday life, billionaires certainly do. That alone makes them spectacularly unfit to be anywhere near the levers of power, to dictate economic policy, or to make pronouncements that anyone in their right mind should listen to.

It’s a mind-bogglingly large sum of money, so let’s try to make it meaningful in day-to-day terms. If someone gave you $1,000 every single day and you didn’t spend a cent, it would take you three years to save up a million dollars. If you wanted to save a billion, you’d be waiting around 2,740 years… All this shows how the personal wealth of billionaires cannot be made through hard work alone. The accumulation of extreme wealth depends on other systems, such as exploitative labor practices, tax breaks, and loopholes that are beyond the reach of most ordinary people.

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The notion that a billionaire has worked hard for every penny of their wealth is simply fanciful. The median U.S. salary is $34,612, but even if you tripled that and saved every penny for a lifetime, you still wouldn’t accumulate anywhere close to a billion dollars. Here, it’s also worth looking at Oxfam’s extensive study on extreme wealth, which found that approximately one-third of global billionaire fortunes were inherited. It’s not about working harder, smarter, or better. There are many factors built into our economic system that help extreme wealth to multiply fast. It’s a matter of being well-placed to benefit from the structures that favor capital and produce a profit off the back of exploitation.

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Jeff Bezos could give every single one of his 876,000 employees a $105,000 bonus and he’d still be as rich as he was at the start of the pandemic.

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It’s true that the billionaire class creates jobs and that wages have the potential to drive the economy, but that argument falters when workers barely have enough to survive. The potential to generate tax dollars from billion-dollar profits is enormous. Oxfam found that if the world’s richest 1% paid just 0.5% more in tax, we could educate all 262 million children who are currently out of school and provide health care to save the lives of 3.3 million. But given generous tax cuts and easily exploitable loopholes like the ability to register wealth in offshore tax havens, this rarely comes to pass.

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Some favor the adoption of universal social security measures, paid for via progressive taxes. It’s been argued that Universal Basic Income, Guaranteed Minimum Income, and Universal Basic Services could aid prosperity in a world grappling with growing populations, societal aging, and climate breakdown. Piecemeal proposals are not enough to remedy a crisis of poverty in the midst of plenty. And a fair world would not further the acceleration of either.

Source: Teen Vogue

Image: Adam Nir