I share with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the belief that there are no good billionaires.
“There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said during a May appearance on “It’s Open,” comedian Ilana Glazer’s podcast. “You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.”
Her remarks caused an explosion of outrage from a lot of very rich people — and the media outlets they own — but many experts agree with her views.
“Billionaires just have too much and give back too little,” Brian Galle, a law professor at the University of California at Berkley, told me. In January, Galle published a book-length report titled “How to Tax the Ultrarich” for the Roosevelt Institute, and he has argued that a major problem with hyper-wealth is it creates unchecked power. “They control media, other key enterprises, and today the Cabinet.”
Billionaires have almost always obtained their money either by dishonorable means or by inheriting it from people who obtained it by dishonorable means and that any system that allows people to achieve this status is immoral. By dishonorable, I mean either illegally, or by using their connections to get an unfair advantage over others, or by taking advantage of all the loopholes available to exploit their employees or the resources of the Earth, or to drive out their competitors. It is the very rare person who had a good idea and then turned that into extreme wealth without using dubious methods. Hence billionaires should be considered to be people of poor character and one should never vote them into positions of any authority because they will use their power to further enrich themselves.
But one feature about politics that many observers have noted is that many lower-income voters are quite willing to support extremely wealthy candidates and vote into office people who do not represent their interests and in fact end up pursuing policies that harm them.
There are many factors that lie behind this phenomenon but undoubtedly one is the myth that wealthy elites propagate and the media disseminate, that the US is a meritocracy and that they got where they are by hard work, ingenuity, skill, and dedication, and that once in office they will use those qualities to benefit the people rather than themselves. These wealthy are seen by their supporters as to be admired, rather than viewed with extreme suspicion about their integrity.
I was struck by this quote from a voter in Clacton in the UK where Nigel Farage is running for re-election in that constituency, that captures this mentality.
In Jaywick, a poorer neighbourhood 2 miles south of Clacton-on-Sea, voters are backing Farage.
“Nigel is not running scared of the parliamentary investigation,” says Martin, a retired locksmith who says he is on “first name terms” with Farage. “I think he is honest. What reason would he have not to be? He made his fortune in the City and he’s gone into politics to do something better for this country.
The idea that rich people will not enrich themselves in office because they are already wealthy and thus immune to the temptations of bribery and other forms of corruption seem to be widespread despite the many pieces of evidence that run counter to this myth. Trump is of course a prime example. He ran for the presidency boasting that because he was already rich he would be able to act purely in the people’s interest. But in office he has used every lever of power that he has, and there are many, to get more money, from the small to the big, for himself and his family and his cronies. Nigel Farage is also wealthy but seems to be constantly on the make, finding ways to get richer however dubious the means and sources.
The reality is that people who are very rich got that way by being utterly greedy and not caring about the fate of others. It is a deeply-rooted character trait, not one that changes easily, and one should always assume that they will continue to act that way. There may be the occasional class traitor who decides that they have got enough money, feels a little guilty about it, and now plans to work for the public good. But the burden is on them to show by their actions that that is indeed the case. One evidence would be if they support much higher taxes on wealth and income. In the cases of Trump and Farage, there has been zero evidence that they ever acted in any way that was for the public good at their own expense.
I am curious as to the extent that this myth of the beneficence of wealthy politicians depends on the socioeconomic status of the person. On a casual level it seems to be bimodal. On the one hand, it seems to be more common among people who are in the lower income brackets, who seem to think that they can aspire to be wealthy like their heroes if they too work hard. On the other hand, it is also common among the very wealthy because it feeds into their self-image as being admirable people and not unscrupulous predators.
It may be that it is people in the middle, who are aware that they have reached the peak of income possibilities and rising higher than that requires them to engage in dishonest and unethical practices, are the ones who are more skeptical of the characters of the wealthy. There was a Pew survey that broke down views of whether the existence of billionaires was a good or bad thing by age (younger people view them more negatively) but there was no difference based on family income. Another survey found that younger people are much more likely than the oldest to say that being extremely rich is morally wrong. But unfortunately this survey did not break it down by socioeconomic categories, which is what this post is about.
From the Salon article: “… Swift has lost touch with humanity.
I completely agree that millionaires and especially billionaires should pay far higher taxes, but let’s be fair. That sentence above from Marcotte is just nonsense.
Variety: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Donated $26 Million to Charities Ahead of Wedding
Wikipedia: Taylor Swift #Philanthropy
As a contrast, the Wikipedia entry about Donald Trump has zero occurrences of the word “philanthropy”.
Amanda Marcotte recently reached the same conclusion as the headline above, with double-billionaire Taylor Swift as her case study.
Marcotte bases her case on the traffic jams and train reschedulings attributed to the “T&T” wedding in NYC, plus what she calls a “colder” style in Swift’s music. I dunno about the latter, and suspect the former constitute life-as-usual in the Big Grapple, but I still consider TS may embody the least-worst of her class.
Pierce R. Butler @ 3
Yeah, NYC never has traffic jams and train rescheduling without Swift in town. Swift even paid for the extra cops.
“you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth,”
Swift’s workers are treated well and are paid very well.
Swift is the least problematic of the billionaire class and Marcotte should be embarrassed for trying to use Swift as an example.
Most support for Farage comes from racists, and is not connected to Frage’s wealth or grift. Farage has in the past said that he would have problems is a family of Romanians moved in next door, that all Jews should be gassed, and he is an advocate of remigration. That is where his support comes from.
“Ponse, back where—when—I came from there never was a man so rich but what he needed more money. Usually, the richer he was, the more he needed.”
—Farnham’s Freehold, by Robert A. Heinlein
Definitionally, a billionaire can lose at least 99.9% of their net worth and still be a millionaire, and being a millionaire is enough to ensure financial security with all needs and even luxuries met for life. The wealth of a billionaire is very much like the classic image of dragon’s hoard -- plundered riches piled together and guarded jealously by a creature that does not need it and whose life is not improved by it.
Wealth taxes are analogous to the hero of the story coming along and driving the dragon off.
With the exception of very successful artists, and a few very successful inventors/ entrepreneurs it is indeed hard to find billionaires that aquired the wealth in a moral way, if we rule out scions of older billionaires.
I don’t think there are good billionaires. I think there might be neutral ones. Even if you consider billionaires like Swift and Buffet their wealth is largely coming from/through companies that do NOT treat their workers well. No amount of money they throw at these companies they depend on will ever change that because the so-called “trickle down” economy is really the “flood upwards” economy.
If you think about it, there’s a whole class of people who are probably not even billionaires but are tasked with making sure the rest of us are kept down. A C-suite executive that’s earning $12 million a year is getting 3-4 times what most of us could hope for in our lifetimes and they’re getting it yearly. They’re never going to be a billionaire themselves but outside of buying things like large companies and megayachts there isn’t much that really separates their buying power from a billionaire. They can certainly live whatever sort of comfortable life they choose with that sort of money. And all they have to do to earn it is protect the wealth of their benefactor by making sure the rest of us don’t get our fair share of the company’s profits.
The main concern of the very rich and greedy is making sure there’s always a ready supply of people desperate enough to do the work that keeps them absurdly rich while getting paid as little as the rich person can get away with. This is why AI is so well funded right now. It’s a pipe dream but it’s a pipe dream entirely tailored to the desires of the most greedy among us. If you can consider a very rich person who never socializes with working class people to still be “among us.”
Holms @7:
I’ve added that to a list of quotes that I don’t want to forget. 😎
Holms @ # 7: … being a millionaire is enough to ensure financial security with all needs and even luxuries met for life.
Uh, welcome to the 21st century. One serious medical event can zero out a mere millionaire in a few weeks. Hell, a sharply reduced income plus a big McMansion mortgage/tax bill could do the same in less than a year.
Pierce @#11
That does rather depend on where you live of course, there being plenty of countries with national health services paid for largely or entirely out of taxes.
#10 billseymour
🙂
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#11 Pierce
Ah, I forget sometimes I am speaking to people living in USA. I definitely had my Living-In-Australia goggles on when I said that.
John Scalzi’s latest book “When the Moon Hits Your Eye” has a fun story un it about a crass billionaire who wants to be the first man to eat cheese from the Moon.