Abolish billionaires. The world would be better off without them.

Some ideas about how to make the world better require careful, nuanced thinking about how best to balance competing interests. Others don’t: Billionaires are bad. We should presumptively get rid of billionaires. All of them.

Does this sound like an incitement to the most dreaded kind of revolution, when people are struck down by the mob simply on the basis of some crude simple standard? It is not. The people who have a billion dollars are fine; they may go on living. It is just that, for the sake of everyone else (and, honestly, for their own sake) they must not be allowed to possess a billion dollars.

No one needs a billion dollars. No one deserves a billion dollars. There is a widespread moral and conceptual error, in a society saturated in the ideology of competition and monetary success, that the property a person has gotten does not simply belong to that person but is, somehow, itself an embodiment of their personhood—that to separate a person from property is to attack their human existence.

This is true to an extent—to the extent that property secures a person food, and shelter, and physical security, and health and futurity. Even, despite the inequities and injustices that have emerged by this level, a person’s opportunities to have leisure, to make art, etc.

None of this comes anywhere near adding up to a billion dollars.

Another error is the belief that billionaires have made their money by adding value to society, of which they take a minor share. One pictures some great industrialist inventing and manufacturing a useful item, which makes every single person’s life better, and in return receiving a small share of the price of the item.

http://hmmdaily.com/2018/10/16/no-billionaires/

http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/abolish-billionaires-the-world-would-be-better-off-without-them-20190207-p50wbd.html

Con't

Con't

A kindergarten teacher, teaching 25 new people a year not to bite each other and to work in occasional harmony with strangers, produces far more social good in a lifetime than an industrialist does. Even to picture the billionaire as a productive industrialist is too optimistic—read up and down the Forbes list, larded with monopolists, retailers, retail monopolists, the heirs of retail monopolies, real estate magnates, Mark Zuckerberg.

What do they do with all their extra money? They buy atrocious houses. They shut down publications. They buy politicians, over and under the table. Now a whole batch of them have moved directly into government—and we have the most corrupt and incompetent executive branch in memory to show for it.

When we speak of the better billionaires, we simply mean the ones who are not actively malignant. There are no good billionaires. There may be some relatively good people who are attached to a pile of money that stacks one billion dollars high, but the money does not improve them. It makes them worse. Their good points would be no less good if they held only, say, 500 million dollars. And their bad points would be that much less of a problem for anyone else.

I've heard the idea before, and I can tell you it will never happen and it wouldn't work anyway!
Think about it: should we really destroy the financial incentive that the most productive people have to work? What would you do when the value of someone's business becomes so successful that its value rises to over a billion? If you take their money, would you give it back if the business subsequently loses money?

Having a billion dollars doesn't automatically make someone a worse person. Billionaires don't all make their money the same way, nor behave the same way when they have it.

Here's a more practical idea, but it might be too radical even for you:
Remove the need to suck up to billionaires!
This can be done by reintroducing capable government.

Philip,

I'm more worried about the socialists who want everyone to be 'equal' than I am about billionaires. Of course one of the worst socialists of the modern area, Fidel Castro, who also 'believed' in equality, was a billionaire. Some of his loot (and I use that word adviseedly) will probably end up in the hands of his grandson, Tony Castro, who is already a millionaire play boy.

So Philip, what do you propose to do with the money/property that you take from all of Australia's billionaires?

Also, I would really like to know just how much you think you yourself would gain from this?

Lastly, what exactly is it that you think the billionaires have done that is detrimental to you? (Have they stolen money/property from you? Have they limited your rights to some sort of freedom (eg: freedom to associate, freedom to speak, freedom of religion, freedom to marry, etc..? Have have prevented you from you yourself being able to become wealthy? )

Do away with very rich people & you increase poverty ! Introduce a flat tax & even the less well off will instantly be better off. Abolish foreign land ownership or at least restrict it to Nationals in whose countries Australians can own land also.
To achieve a cohesive society one simply can't go past a National Service which offers apart from many obvious opportunities, the opportunity of acquiring a healthy mentality. It would be an ideal basis upon which to develop a much needed Australian culture, totally independent of the old world drabs of culture so many cling to without even knowing why. instead of handing hundreds of millions of international aid to foreign Govts, much of that funding could be used to manufacture goods to be sent as aid but manufactured here, creating employment here.
The incentive to work from paying less tax would have this nation in no time up front on the scale of best places to live.