There are over 2,000 billionaires in the world and every single one of them is richer than they deserve.
Billionaires aren’t the super inspirational leaders of capitalism. They’re actually a nasty by-product of financial market deregulation and tax breaks for the wealthy. And their existence harms you personally.
How much is a billion dollars?
A billion dollars is equal to 1,000 million, or $1,000,000,000.
It’s difficult to conceptualize how much a billion dollars really is, even if you’re an intelligent person with a brain for math. The sum is so outrageously huge, so beyond our normal everyday frame of reference. It’s far easier to understand it on paper than in practice.
A billion dollars is more than just a staggering amount of money, it’s a staggering amount of power. Billionairehood doesn’t simply mean a life of incredible leisure and luxury, it means an existence above the law. Being a billionaire means being able to circumvent the law because you can pay any price anybody asks to get out of jail.
A billion dollars is an impossible amount of wealth
If a billionaire decided to put themselves on a financial diet and restrict their yearly spending to match the limits of the common man, they could live without running out of money for 32,155 years.
When people come to the defense of billionaires, they often do it with a scarcity complex. There’s this strange idea that if we redistributed all the billionaires’ wealth, there wouldn’t be “enough”. This is where not being able to conceptualize how much a billion dollars is: there is more than enough.
We can have billionaires or we can eliminate homelessness, provide universal public education, ensure everyone has healthcare, abolish student loan debt, and more. That’s how much money it is.
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What’s wrong with billionaires?
In short, everything. Being a billionaire should be considered a hallmark of sociopathy because it is.
We tend to think of billionaires as deserving of their wealth. They’re not. We need to be more critical of the painful reality that the existence of a billionaire depends on literally tens of thousands of people suffering in poverty. We cannot have one without the other.
Is there such thing as an ethical billionaire?
There is no such thing as an ethical billionaire, but there are some billionaires that are better than others.
If you think thousands of people deserve to suffer so a single person can buy a superyacht, you may want to get your mental health checked out. It is immoral that one person can hoard (and all billionairism is hoarding) amounts that could mean life or death for entire populations.
It is not right that one person commits suicide because they get slapped with a $100,000 medical debt that bankrupts their family, and another spends millions encrusting a luxury car in gemstones.
Nobody earns a billion dollars (and you won’t either)
There’s no such thing as a “self-made” billionaire, even though many of them are touted as such. In actuality, the ultra-wealthy earn very little of their wealth.
There is only one way to make a billion dollars: through the ownership of assets. These are usually financial securities like company stocks, and to a lesser extent real estate. These assets do most of the legwork in getting their owner to $1 billion or more. Nobody is working or earning here. They are owning.
Once you have a billion dollars, it will actually keep growing quicker than you can spend it, no matter how hard you try. Many of the world’s billionaires committed to “generosity” have actually found their fortunes doubled in the time they’ve been trying to give them away.
Billionaires are capitalism’s Frankenstein
Billionaires are made by corrupt governments who fail to adequately tax the rich. Failing to pay adequate corporate and personal income taxes led to a hoarding of wealth in investments.
The political deregulation of North American and global financial markets allowed this wealth to compound at an alarming rate. In fact, the wealth of billionaires has been growing by 20% year over year.
Being a billionaire is a form of psychopathy
When a person hoards wealth to the tune of a billion dollars, they do so at the expense of adequate food, shelter, and medical care for other human beings. A billion dollars is a sum that does virtually nothing in the hands of a single person but could transform the livelihood of thousands.
Every single day, every single billionaire decides that their wealth is better utilized existing as numbers on a screen rather than being used in a way to improve the world. They could save people from death without even remotely compromising their lifestyle. They choose not to.
Billionaires are villains. We can’t keep pretending otherwise.
Bill Gates would need to give away $1 billion per year to keep his fortune from growing
Whenever anyone criticizes billionaires, many of their defenders rush to offer praise for Bill Gates. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest philanthropic trust with the world. Since setting up the foundation in 1994, Bill and Melinda Gates have donated more than $36 billion to charitable causes.
Sounds great right? Bill Gates would need to give away $1 billion per year to keep his fortune from growing. Oh, and don’t forget these donations personally gave the Gates couple an 11% income tax break. That’s nearly $4 billion by the way.
Bill Gates is actually a perfect example of the worst sort of billionaire. He’s not casually hiding in the background, swimming in a sea of bills, hoping no one notices how rich he is. He’s out there feeding the narrative that he’s a do-gooder, billionaires are ok guys, and we should be totally fine with a single person having a bank balance greater than some nations’ GDPs.
Bill Gates and other billionaires give to charity not out of the goodness of their hearts, but to placate the masses so there’s no revolt.
How do we fight the billionaire class?
While it’s easy to feel powerless fighting people who literally have more wealth than you could accumulate in tens of thousands of lifetimes, there are things you can do!
Get politically involved. Elect leaders and representatives who advocate for better wealth redistribution and higher taxes on the ultra-wealthy. Be outspoken and critical about the growing problem of wealth inequality.
And most importantly, stop seeing the wealth Billionaires have amassed as earned or fair. It isn’t. And start seeing it for what it is: financial and physical security that has been stolen from you and everyone else.
6 Comments. Leave new
Don’t forget that a lot of these ultra-wealthy became so because their company is a monopoly and getting monopoly rents off consumers, stifling innovation of others and keeping up barriers to entry. The government is supposed to protect us from monopolies, but… it hasn’t been.
I just read this article and it is very one sided and feels very liberal-ish. Billionaires are billionaires because of the fact they had an idea and ran with it. If you don’t want billionaires don’t but their products. I bet this was typed on a Mac book or a PC running Windows. I assume this was originally typed using Microsoft Word. Seeing the problem yet? You say you don’t want billionaires but you are using their products to keep them rich. Without their product they would not be rich. What are the chances of people giving up their iPhones? You do know that Apple is the richest company in the world and that Steve Jobs had a net worth of 10 Billion before he died right?
Simply creating a wealth tax isn’t going to solve the issue. Consumers not buying their products will.
Also instead of saying billionaires are the worst people ever, why don’t the people who complain about it create an idea, learn the loopholes, become a billionaire themselves and give the money away as they wish to pave the way for future billionaires? You see we should not be criticizing them. We should be learning how to join them. That would be true wealth distribution.
Hi David,
Money After Graduation is a liberal financial publication. We will always discuss personal finance in the context of wealth inequality, privilege, race, LGBTQ+, etc because all of these have an impact on income, wealth accumulation, and debt.
As mentioned in the post, billionaires are actually NOT billionaires because they “had an idea and ran with it”. They are billionaires because of financial market deregulation and lax corporate tax laws. I STRONGLY encourage you to look into this before you try to make the “good idea” argument. The stock market run up over the past decade has made more billionaires than “good ideas” ever did.
Have a great day!
While we vote every day with our dollar, there is a lack of ethical companies in certain fields. Take electronics, since you complain about “liberals and their iPhones”. Virtually all processors, motherboards, etc. are manufactured in China because that’s where it’s cheapest to make those products. Some electronics are made in South Korea, like Samsung and LG. Even they outsource the majority of their manufacturing to China for the same reason. In addition to a lack of choice, companies spend billions annually in advertising and PR to get you to buy their crap and feel good about it. People who make your arguments are either uneducated or are benefitting financially from the status quo. I suppose it’s easier live in denial because it’s more convenient, but you clearly have no idea how the world really works.
Oh what an Awesome blog , I will surely visit again, keep on the good work.
I enjoyed this article. I have not been a fan of the whole spread the wealth idea, but you made some great points in a way that has made me rethink the whole concept. One reason I’m realizing that it’s a problem has been the bans that Twitter, Google, apple, Amazon and Facebook have implemented, and they have shown at least to me, that the few have way more control than they should, and when you start to realize the ungodly amounts of money that the few have, all because of the masses, its mind boggling, and something should be done to fix this as long as its fair and the money is utilized wisely. Sometimes I wonder that because we have let things get so big and out of control, is it too late? Lastly we have become such a greedy society thats all about me, me, me and my prayer is that we find our moral compass and start thinking of others. Thanks for the article!