Billionaires Are A Threat To Society— There Shouldn't Be Any
"There Are No Benevolent Billionaires. There Are No Public-Minded Plutocrats"
Last week, Erica Payne, president of the Patriotic Millionaires was invited to a United Nations meeting to address tax matters. She feels strongly that “If we do not address the twin crises of wealth concentration and inequality, we will face in the next decade the wholesale dismantling and eventual death of liberal democracy, of justice, and of basic human freedom.” Her message to the delegates: “Tax the rich. Save the world. It’s that simple.”
Afterwards, she wrote that “We are at a critical moment. Later this year, leaders from the world’s twenty largest economies are gathering in New Delhi for the G20 Summit. After years of advocacy, finance ministers from France, Brazil, and other G20 nations have finally called for global cooperation on a billionaire tax to be added to the meeting’s agenda. This is a significant win. These leaders are finally beginning to take extreme wealth concentration seriously and understand the threat it poses to global democracy. But one crucial voice is missing from the list of finance leaders who are calling for this to be added to the agenda: U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.”
Since 2020, 5 billionaires have doubled their wealth, while 5 billion of the poorest people in this world got even poorer. Children starve while billionaires fly their rockets into space.
Extreme wealth and extreme poverty are on the rise. Tax rates on the uber-rich have collapsed across the world. Over the last decade, the richest 1% have captured half of all of the new wealth created, and it’s not because they are twice as talented as everyone else in the world.
It's how the system has been designed.
The reality is there are no benevolent billionaires. There are no public-minded plutocrats.
Too much money always turns into too much power. That power threatens us all.
The threat billionaires pose to democracy is real, and pressure is mounting to tackle the unchecked accumulation of wealth by a handful of global plutocrats. Fortunately, we know what the solution is: taxes. We just need political leaders with the courage to do the right thing.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. The idea that extreme concentrations of wealth can threaten democratic governance has historical precedents dating back to ancient times, proving that the dynamics of wealth accumulation and its impact on political power have been a detriment to humanity all through history. In ancient Rome, for example, wealth and political power were closely intertwined. The Roman Republic saw the rise of wealthy patrician families— the Scipio family, the Claudius family, the Cornelians, the Julians— who used their economic resources to gain and hold political influence. These greed-obsessed elites, referred to as the "noble class," controlled significant portions of land, resources and financial assets and their wealth enabled them to secure positions of authority within the Roman Senate and other governing bodies, influencing legislation and policy decisions in their favor. This concentration of power among the wealthy contributed to political corruption and eventually played a role in the decline of the Roman Republic.
Skipping over fedualism— the Dark Ages— let’s go right to the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age, during which the most avaricious men— Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Andrew Mellon, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, to name a few— amassed immense wealth and wielded significant influence over economic and political affairs. Their control over industries, financial markets and lobbying efforts led to monopolies and worker exploitation and undermined democratic processes and undue political influence. These men used their wealth to wield political influence, making astronomical contributions to political campaigns and then lobbying lawmakers to further their interests. Their ability to sway government policy and legislation undermined the democratic process, allowing a handful of wealthy individuals to shape the direction of the country according to their own agendas, often at the expense of the broader population. Their monopolies allowed them to control prices and stifle competition, just the way Apple, Google, etc do today. Monopolistic practices limit consumer choice and always lead to higher prices for goods and services. Besides which, in their pursuit of profit maximization, these robber barons subjected their workers to harsh working conditions, long hours and low wages. Employee safety was ignored, leading to workplace accidents, injuries and deaths. The lack of labor regulations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries meant that workers had virtually no recourse to address grievances, contributing to widespread exploitation and suffering among the working class.
The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals or corporations leads to economic instability. The unchecked power of the robber barons contributed to market volatility and financial crises— the Panic of 1893 and the Panic of 1907. Their control over key industries and financial markets allowed them to manipulate economic conditions for their benefit and these manipulations had negative repercussions for the broader economy, while their influence over government officials, regulatory agencies and legislative processes raised alarms about the integrity of democratic governance.
Yesterday, Bloomberg, of all sources, noted that “The progressive rallying cry of ‘tax the rich’ has morphed into a popular policy stance with voters in the key states that will decide the 2024 election, enjoying support even among those who prefer billionaire Donald Trump, according to the latest Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll. Fully 69% of registered voters in seven swing states say they favor higher taxes on billionaires, and they support higher income taxes on people who make more than $400,000 a year by the same margin, a potential boon to Biden’s economic agenda if he wins a second term.”
Today, worse than the Scipio family, the Claudius family, the Cornelians, the Julians, worse than the feudal lords and monarchs, worse than Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Andrew Mellon, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould is fascist little shit— is multibillionaire Elon Musk ($192.6 billion). A special wealth tax should levied on him that leaves him a very wealthy man— at least $20 million. Maybe $30 million. I’m just spitballing here. But meanwhile, Musk, an unstable and even unhinged individual with severe mental illness, is a threat to the rest of the country. He regularly buys into dangerous QAnon conspiracy theories. Take the neo-Nazi “Great Replacement Theory” that Musk has bought into and is promoting.
For months, Elon Musk has been dropping decidedly unsubtle hints that he believes in the great replacement, a conspiracy theory that liberal elites are “importing” immigrants into the United States, Europe, and Australia to wage political and biological warfare against white people. In a contentious interview that aired last week with Don Lemon, Musk said he doesn’t “subscribe to that” before detailing what he does believe— which is effectively still great replacement theory.
“I’m simply saying there’s an incentive here,” Musk said. “If illegal immigrants— which I think have a very strong bias to vote Democrat— the more they come into the country, the more they’re likely to vote in that direction.” But as Lemon points out, undocumented immigrants can’t vote, nor can legal immigrants who are here on visas, or people with green cards. Musk said it’s not just about votes but also about the census. “The House seat apportionment is proportionate to the number of people, not just the number of citizens,” Musk said, adding that immigrants “overwhelmingly go to places like California and New York.”
It’s true that congressional apportionment is based on census population data. But as its name suggests, the decennial census is conducted every ten years. More importantly, Musk’s argument betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the immigration system functions.
Most of the people arriving at the border today won’t be in the country by the time the next census is conducted in 2030. When someone crosses the border without authorization or asks for asylum at a port of entry, they aren’t just released into the country indefinitely. They’re given a hearing date in immigration court, often months or years in the future because of the significant and ever-growing backlog of immigration cases. Because of the backlog, the average adjudication time for asylum cases is now a little over four years— a long time, yes, but still not long enough for people to be counted in the census. And most of those cases will end in denials: just 9 percent of cases decided in the 2023 fiscal year ended in asylum or another grant of relief, according to the Congressional Research Service. The rest end in deportation.
The people who do get asylum still can’t vote— at least not immediately. Asylees have to wait a year after being granted asylum to apply for green cards, and at least five more years after that before applying for citizenship.
Though it’s worth explaining how all of this works to understand how nonsensical Musk’s beliefs are, the facts don’t really matter to people who are convinced that the great replacement is actually happening. The real die-hards don’t think it’s a scheme to create a permanent Democratic majority; they think it’s a plot to ethnically replace white Americans. At its core, the great replacement is about demographics, not democracy.
The great replacement is a fundamentally racist, antisemitic conspiracy theory. Its adherents are preoccupied with birth rates. They believe there’s a global plot to eradicate the white race; the “replacement” they fear is literal, not political. Musk has hinted at this before. In November, he favorably replied to an antisemitic post on Twitter that accused “Jewish populations” of sending “hordes of minorities” to Western countries. That’s why tiki torch-wielding neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2016 and why a mass shooter killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh a year later.
In his interview with Lemon, Musk explained that what he really meant was that “a prominent number of Jewish philanthropists fund groups that they should really take a closer look at.” As for the tweets Musk shared about the “Hispanic invasion” of America at the hands of Democrats and their elite masters, well, he wants us to believe it’s not that serious. “If I quote something, it doesn’t mean I agree with everything in it,” Musk said. “It’s just something that— I think this is something people should consider.”
Musk is trying to have it both ways: he wants to send obvious great replacement dogwhistles, but, lest it scare advertisers away, he doesn’t want anyone to accuse him of wholeheartedly believing in what he’s saying. When it suits him, Twitter is the most important social platform for information, with far-reaching implications for free speech and democracy. But when anyone criticizes or asks him to explain his own posts, he claims they were just tweets.
What Musk is promoting is a blatant Republican Party/MAGA talking point. But it is also racist, xenophobic, fascistic and anti-Semitic. The nativism inherent in this bullshit can be traced back to the 19th and early 20th centuries, when waves of immigration to the United States led to the rise of xenophobia. Groups such as the Know-Nothings targeted immigrants, particularly Catholics and later Eastern European and Asian immigrants, portraying them as threats to American values and institutions. Nativist rhetoric often focused on fears of being "replaced" by newcomers who were perceived as culturally or racially inferior. Throughout history, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have often centered around the idea of Jews plotting to undermine or control society. One infamous example is the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a fabricated text purporting to outline a Jewish plan for global domination. This document, which emerged in the early 20th century, fueled anti-Semitic sentiments and conspiracy theories about Jewish influence in politics, finance, and media. Think of it as the Fox News or QAnon of its day.
The Nazi regime in Germany promoted the idea of racial purity and the need to defend the Aryan race against supposed threats from other racial and ethnic groups. Hitler's concept of "Lebensraum" (living space) for the German people involved territorial expansion into Eastern Europe, accompanied by the expulsion or extermination of non-German populations deemed racially undesirable. This genocidal ideology culminated in the Holocaust, during which millions of Jews and other targeted groups were systematically murdered. Yeah, let’s leave Musk with $20 million, not $30 million. Now... what about Bezos?
