I have wanted to make a website for a while now promoting the idea that billionaires should not exist. Capitalism is a deeply flawed system and billionaires are the by-product of that system. There should be a limit upon how much wealth an individual person can accumulate. And that as individuals collect more resources (money) they should be expected to contribute more.
Billionaires are a result of failed economic and political systems. Systems which are intentionally manipulated to consolidate wealth to a few individuals. Capitalism doesn’t reward hard-work. Capitalism rewards exploitation. This is exasperated by political and legal structures which enable and protect wealth consolidation.
This outdated approach of resource distribution must be abolished and replaced with something better. There is no reason for people to be homeless. No reason for people to be hungry. No reason for people to work forty hours a week and still struggle to pay their bills. No reason that is, other than greed.
The 10 riches men in the world doubled their fortunes during the pandemic from 700 billion to 1.5 trillion dollars.
~ Oxfam.
Inequality contributes to the death of at least one person every four seconds. That means by the time you read this sentence someone has died because of billionaires.
We can’t hope that someday these ultra-wealthy will decide they have enough. That was trickle down economics and the past four decades have only resulted in greater inequality. The time has come for something better.
The Issue
The first step in solving a problem is recognizing there is one.
~ Will McAvoy (Aaron Sorkin, Newsroom)
One of the first issues is that humans are fucking terrible at math. For a species that uses statistics and averages and stuff like that we are absolutely shit at being able to visualize anything beyond ten. For example, try this little experiment. Picture a cat. Now picture three cats pretty easy right. Now picture ten cats. A bit harder right? Can you see each individual cat?
Try to picture twenty cats. Now picture 47 cats. Now picture 2135 cats. You can’t. You can picture a lot of cats, but after a point it gets really hard, if not impossible so you just picture a “bunch of cats”. So it is with large numbers.
To get a better idea of the difference between a million and a billion let me explain:
A million seconds is about 11.6 days. A billion seconds is 31.7 years. If you made $1 per second every day (earning $86,400 a day – twice the average yearly income) it would still take you over 30 years to become a billionaire!
I recommend you look at https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ to begin to try and understand the enormity of what a billion is, and exactly how crazy rich billionaires are.
Another issue around massive wealth inequality is the effect it has on democracy. When billionaires can afford to purchase media outlets like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, they have a direct effect on information and in turn, democracy.
Think of the way the Washington post changed it’s tune regarding wealth after Bezos purchased the newspaper. Some people might say it’s okay for the ultra-wealthy to buy whatever they like but it isn’t.
The amount of misinformation that the ultra-wealthy spread through the media they own is astounding. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox news is a great example. Look at how the same message is pumped across all of these stations. Famous Nazi Joseph Goebbels said, “Repeat a lie often enough and people will believe it.”
This allows billionaires to point the finger at disadvantaged groups, like immigrants and convince audiences that that group is the problem. Meanwhile stealing trillions from ordinary citizens.
What’s more, wealth pretty much guarantees access to policy makers and leading politicians. This is because it’s expensive to run for office. In the US, 50% of congress are millionaires but only 1% of the general population is. George Soros donated $128 million dollars to the democratic party in 2022. I am pretty sure Joe Biden picks up the phone if he calls.
“We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both,”
Associate Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
In the US the government provided PPP (Paycheck protection program) loans to businesses to help them with payroll. However research has shown that the majority of those loans were not necessary. The majority went to business owners and stakeholders, not employees as intended.
The study estimated that $365.9 billion, or 72%, of the PPP dollars ultimately flowed to the top-fifth of high-earners, who make up a disproportionate amount of the country’s income and business owners. The bottom quintile got $13.2 billion, or 2.6% of the $510 billion.
In other words, the rich got richer and the poor stayed poor.
