Not even anyone I know wants to drag billionaires to guillotines just because they’re billionaires. Not even Elon Musk. There are however many billionaires who should be dragged to guillotines— like Trump, Putin, Roman Abramovich, Viktor Vekselberg, the Sackler family, Mohamed bin Salman, Omar al-Bashir, Alisher Usmanov, and Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo— though not because of their financial states. Anyway, that’s besides kind of the point. You'll see what I mean.
Writing for The Guardian on Monday, Bernie noted that “Never before in American history have so few owned so much and has there been so much income and wealth inequality. Never before in American history has there been such concentration of ownership in our economy with a handful of giant corporations controlling sector after sector, enjoying record-breaking profits. Never before in American history have we seen a ruling class, utilizing a corrupt political system, exercise so much political power through their Super Pacs and ownership of media. And never before in American history have we seen the level of greed, arrogance and irresponsibility that we see today on the part of the 1%. Corporate greed is rampant. Meanwhile, as the billionaire class becomes richer and more powerful, over 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and many work for starvation wages and under terrible working conditions. Incredibly, despite huge increases in worker productivity and an explosion in technology, the average American worker is making over $45 a week less today than he or she did 50 years ago after adjusting for inflation.”
You should read his whole OpEd. He concluded by writing that “Needless to say, changes that benefit the working class of our country are not going to be easily handed over by the corporate elite. They have to be fought for– and won. And in that regard there has been some very good news over the last several years. We are now seeing workers stand up and fight for justice in a way we have not seen in decades. In America, more workers want to join unions; more workers are joining unions– 273,000 last year alone; and more workers are going out on strike for decent wages and benefits and winning. We’re seeing that increased militancy all across our economy– with truck drivers, auto workers, writers, actors, warehouse workers, healthcare professionals, graduate student teachers and baristas. Let’s continue that struggle. Let’s think big, not small. Let’s create an economy and government that work for all, not just the few.”
Tyler Harper and Lief Weatherby were thinking big when they wrote a sensible post about the twin threats of environmental collapse and artificial intelligence for Jacobin this week: Billionaires Are the Real Existential Risk. “The prognosis,” they wrote, “feels grim. As even Barack Obama pointed out long ago, the complexity of climate change exploits the weakest point in the international system: its inability to coordinate planning in the face of crisis. AI presents a similar challenge: its already vast global digital infrastructure makes regulation a seemingly Sisyphean task. These types of threats have been dubbed “existential risks” by philosophers like Nick Bostrom and William MacAskill— problems that could lead to human extinction or the irrecoverable collapse of civilization. Disaster feels more palpable than any time since the Cold War.”
The new digital infrastructures and the climate crisis are inextricably linked. Both are the bastard children of planetary-scale neoliberalism, a cancerous economic logic that now threatens to gobble up its natural resource base. Criticism of AI tends to focus on either its bias and potential harm or on its global immiseration of labor and extractivist mining practices. The form of capitalism we currently live in is rarely mentioned, or is taken for granted. Radical environmentalism gave way to green capitalism and the billionaires that stand to profit from it. It’s no coincidence that these bourgeois modes of critique focus on technology and miss capital, the elephant in the room.
Environmental catastrophe and metastasizing digital systems are mutually reinforcing— two crises locked in a death spiral. Considering AI and climate change as a unit is the only way out of the impasses created by current attempts to address both. Billionaires are an existential risk because they are the node linking the two disasters.
…Capital is eating its own tail, and humans are going to be chewed up along the way if we do not reverse course. Where Karl Marx saw the subjection of labor to capital, we are witnessing capital’s invasion of its historic seat of power, the corporation itself. Industry leaders and even billionaires themselves know this is not sustainable, but their “recognition” of it in public comes in a mystified form that passes off Terminator fantasies and geoengineering solutions as responses.
Let’s not get it confused: AI and climate are existential risks. But the risk part of existential risk comes from the social formation we have allowed to develop, not from technology itself. We have seen calls over the course of our young century to consider whether it is moral to allow billionaires to exist. But the real question is whether our species can survive the billionaire.
The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small number of billionaires is a major factor in both of these risks. Billionaires have the resources to fund research into dangerous technologies, and they also have the power to influence public policy in ways that make it more difficult to address climate change. Capitalism, is inherently unsustainable and contributes to both AI and climate risks, while encouraging the exploitation of natural resources and the concentration of wealth, both of which are obviously the major drivers of climate change. Taxing the category of billionaires out of existence could redistribute wealth to a more equitable level, reduce the concentration of power in the hands of a few individuals, raise significant revenue that could be used to fund social programs and send a message that society does not and will not tolerate extreme wealth inequality.
I’d like to address the 4 bullshit GOP/Fox arguments against taxing the category “billionaires” out of existence.
1- It would discourage innovation and entrepreunship. There’s not a scintilla of evidence to suggest that taxing the wealth of billionaires would discourage either innovation and entrepreneurship. In fact, the opposite is true. There has been research and studies that have shown that a more equitable distribution of wealth can actually increase innovation. For example, a study by the World Bank found that countries with more equal distributions of wealth tend to have higher rates of innovation.
2- It would be too difficult to enforce. OK, it’s true that it could be difficult to enforce a tax on the wealth of billionaires. That’s where a couple of uses of the guillotine I mentioned above would solve the problem. We might need to roll it out every generation or so as a reminder. Besides, it’s not an insurmountable problem. The government could use a variety of methods to enforce the tax, such as requiring billionaires to disclose their assets and tracking their financial transactions very carefully.
3- Capital flight: It’s possible that some wealthy individuals might move their assets to other countries with lower taxes if their wealth were taxed more heavily. However, that’s unlikely to be a major problem. Most wealthy individuals have strong ties to their home countries and are unlikely to give up those ties for the sake of tax savings.
4- It’s unfair to punish people who have been successful. Some people might argue that it’s unfair to punish individuals who have been successful in accumulating wealth. However, it’s important to remember that billionaires have often benefited from government policies that have subsidized their businesses and given them an unfair advantage over their competitors. Additionally, billionaires often use their wealth to influence government policy in ways that benefit themselves, at the expense of the general public. And, sooner or later people will stop whining that all they have is $750 million and how can they be expected to live on that!