You will never be a billionaire. Just as you will never develop superpowers, travel to another dimension, or rise from the dead, you will never, ever own in excess of a billion pounds in cash or assets.
I feel I can say that with such certainty for two reasons. First, it’s an inconceivably huge sum of wealth. And second, it’s not in the interests of the existing class of billionaires to widen their club very much. Because their billions really are a zero-sum game – they exist alongside the poverty they create.
There are some ideas buried so deeply in the popular psyche that they can be thought of as hegemonic. They’re not ideological but ‘common sense’, reinforced through the culture in which we swim, which presents them not as arguments but as self-evident truths. Ideas around wealth are not just misleading, but warp life itself.
Who works harder?
There are three primary ways in which hyper-wealth can be understood via myth-making.
- It’s deserved, a product of hard work and ingenuity.
Did Richard Branson or Jeff Bezos work hard to get where they are? Are they intelligent? Both are probably true, but hard work isn’t related to amassing billions, because you don’t acquire super-wealth through work but through ownership. A tiny fraction of wealth can be amassed through labour alone, as all we non-billionaires amply demonstrate.
Pop quiz: who works harder, the Duke of Westminster or a nurse who’s worked on an acute ward through this pandemic? If you wondered how income is allocated in a capitalist society, it’s to those who own capital – hence the name. It’s called capitalism, not hardworkism.
- Any impediment to the accumulation of super-wealth is somehow backwards.
It’s what happened to the Rolling Stones in the 1970s. They fled Wilson and Heath’s tax hell for France. Tax the billionaire class and they’ll leave, we’re told. (Though The Stones will also never be billionaires, and probably have as much reason to fear the techbroligarchs as the rest of us).
- Part of the Trump narrative: a billionaire who acquires immense wealth through harming workers, customers, or the environment is ‘smart’.
This is perhaps the most pernicious and deep-seated idea. It shows the extent to which the ideology of the billionaire class has corrupted the rest of us. If screwing people over is seen as ‘smart’ – it’s actually colossally stupid, as it relies on never running out of dupes to scam – then we must assume that we all exist as sociopaths, alienated from others and our own consciences. We must assume that the prime goal of our unrepeatable existence is the hoarding of wealth at all costs, all other considerations being meaningless.
The taxation of wealth
A vast array of daily media messages repeat these myths as axiomatic truths. They’re a strange mixture of the seductive and the depressing. Some young people, who’ve seen most opportunities for advancement stripped away – unless born into wealthy families – find the conspicuous consumption advertised by the super-rich to be aspirational.
Meanwhile the elite class owns, not just the means of generating wealth but also, through donations and influence, much of the political system we rely on for our social ladder. Together they’ve spent nearly five decades sawing through every rung.
The antidote to the British and global billionaire class lies within reach – it’s the taxation of wealth. But this is something governments of both stripes view as anathema, utterly inconceivable. The moment taxing wealth is mentioned, the outriders of the billionaire class in the press clutch their pearls and shriek about tax rises in general. A government that proposes to invest in infrastructure will put up your taxes, they cry. Well, it really doesn’t have to be that way.
When governments spend money on new things like roads and hospitals they don’t, as is often believed, have a whip-round until there’s enough money. Taxes don’t equate to public spending. Governments can create new money through the Bank of England and issuing bonds. All new money is created as debt, and it’s taxation’s job to destroy old money before there’s more currency than economic capacity and inflation results – or so the theory goes.
Billionaires stay billionaires because they find innovative ways of protecting their wealth from the second half of the process. During the era of quantitative easing in the early pandemic, when central banks were issuing vast amounts of money, it was of course the billionaire class which benefited the most from that, too.
An existential matter
The insanely rich require a certain compromised, semi-democratic arrangement to exist at all. It hardly seems a coincidence that UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ recent visit to the annual Glastonbury of the billionaire class led in short order to her watering down taxes on non-domiciled wealth.
We’re currently in a crisis of epic proportions – a country with a flailing economy, soaring levels of deliberately engineered poverty and deprivation, and a newly dangerous global situation. We can’t spend our way out of everything. But if we must pretend that taxation and public spending are connected, there’s one way to raise sufficient taxes to tackle at least some problems: a tax on wealth.
If our society saw billionaires taxed out of existence tomorrow, making them simply exceedingly wealthy people with tens or hundreds of millions of pounds, there would only be positive outcomes all round. The existence of men and women with more wealth than nation states is an historical accident, much as fascism or biological weapons are historical accidents.
Democracies can fix historical accidents, and this is perhaps their primary role. We can witness the consequences of the failure to resolve this one in America at the moment. The super-rich purchase media power and political access. For them, control of society is an existential matter, and it is for us too.
There’s only one zero-sum game we need to play, and at speed – we either demand that wealth is taxed to resolve the multiple crises of our time, or wealth will rule us all.
