Having a billion dollars is the moral equivalent of being a slave owner
This is not to belittle the horrors of slavery; if anything slavery is always consistently worse than anyone imagines. However a person owning a billion dollars leads to an equivalent amount of human suffering.
First a billion dollars concentrated in one person’s control invariably means employing the wealth defense industry. The wealth defense industry is about much more than just finding tax loopholes. They actively change the laws to allow more monopoly, less regulation, and lower taxes for HNWIs (high-net-worth individuals). These changes to the law in turn cause enormous human suffering.
Second a HNWI with a billion dollars can be thought of as an 18th century lord like Lord Melville below.
The mere existence of modern lords enforces hierarchical thinking, but most modern lords also play politics to suppress and increase the poor.
Third a billionaire shifts the allocation of resources towards industry that serves the wealthy and away from common needs. Whether the billion dollars is invested in real estate, the stock market, or whatever the effect is the same. If the billion were in the hands of ordinary people very little of it would be invested.
Fourth the “good” billionaire is much the same as the “good” slave owner. A billion dollars cannot be held by a single person without coercion. This coercion comes in many forms, but it must be employed as a billion dollars cannot be “earned” anymore than you can “earn” the right to own another human being.
A large part of the wealth defense industry is employed producing the propaganda that makes it seem owning a billion dollars is reasonable. This is the same sort of propaganda that invented the concept of an inferior race to justify slavery.
However another form of the coercion is sporadic violence as with George Washington’s slaves:
In 1793, farm manager Anthony Whitting accused Charlotte, an enslaved seamstress, of being “impudent,” by arguing with him and refusing to work. As punishment, he whipped her with a hickory switch, a reprisal Washington deemed “very proper.” Charlotte’s response — that she had not been whipped for 14 years — suggests that physical punishment was sporadic, but not unheard of, at Mount Vernon.
Not having access to food, health care, or shelter is violence, and it’s violence that is justified on the basis of impudent refusal to work or to work hard enough.
Replacing slave owning politicians with billionaires is not progress. During slavery Christianity was frequently used to justify the practice. To argue against these justifications Abraham Lincoln wrote:
‘Give to him that is needy’ is the Christian rule of charity; but ‘Take from him that is needy’ is the rule of slavery.
Modern meritocracy similarly defines classes of humans as inferior and then seeks to take as much as possible from them. The only way to amass a billion dollars is to apply this takers principle at scale.
What makes owning a billion dollars so much more difficult to morally assess is that it has a slippery slope where slavery is black and white. A little boy or girl opens a lemonade stand and charges for the service — so far so good. So there is a spectrum from reasonable economic rewards to rewards that are unreasonable and harmful.
Goldilocks problems are in general difficult for humans. Some people oppose all immigration and others want open immigration. The stance that there is a “just right” amount of immigration will make enemies of both sides. Similarly the abortion debate has trouble defining viability. War hawks and peace doves also typically end up being all or nothing.
However the assertion that morality never catches up to a HNWI no matter how much money they have is obviously preposterous. One person with all the world’s money is clearly completely immoral. So the morality of wealth is a Goldilocks problem but it is one where measuring “just right” is much harder than tasting bowls of porridge.
Books like Limitarianism have been written to try to define just right. The silver lining to the emergence of Elon Musk is that it provides a clear cut example of too much. At level X of radiation people get cancer and at level X of wealth democracy is in immediate danger.
Since we can’t protect democracy or the poor from Musk level wealth, it’s obvious that Musk level wealth must be made impossible. Just as we don’t allow individuals to own nuclear weapons or slaves, they cannot be allowed extreme wealth either.
In fact, despite reams of propaganda explaining otherwise, extreme wealth is already constrained in many ways. In the US individuals, even billionaires, are not allowed to raise armies, pay for sex in most places, buy controlled substances on their own, gamble except in certain areas, or legally marry more than one person. When the morality of an individual’s power comes into question, America frequently chooses to solve the Goldilocks problem by drawing a line far away from potential harm.
Here one might argue that we’ve always allowed unlimited wealth, but that wouldn’t be true. The Magna Carta itself was the result of negotiations over whether or not a king could expropriate money from a baron that had become to wealthy. Agreement was only reached by barons being willing to pay taxes and the king being willing to not ad hoc take their money.
If the Magna Carta is the basis of modern democracy then modern barons being unwilling to pay sufficient taxes to prevent extreme wealth means we have, by definition, lost democracy. We are in territory perhaps worse than kings as any traditional king would have immediately reacted to Elon Musk as a threat to society.
This “it’s always been that way” excuse was also applied to slavery. Yes slavery is not new, but nothing approached the scale of the American version which was the largest long-distance forced movement of people in history. Billionaires on this scale are also new. People might say oh but the gilded age, but no one in the gilded age privately flew into low earth orbit or publicly bought an American president.
The case of the gilded age’s richest man, John D. Rockefeller, brings up another common defense of extreme wealth. If the wealthy amass a great fortune and then use it for philanthropy perhaps they can achieve a net positive. However applying this argument to slavery we can see how silly it is to say, “I should be allowed to own slaves because I’ll use the money made for greater good than the harm I caused.” An individual’s rights cannot be exchanged.
Why draw the line at a billion dollars? Typically these Goldilocks problems lines are drawn far from harm. America even tried to make alcohol illegal but settled for a drinking age of eighteen. So in the end a billion dollars might still be too dangerous, but the important thing is to at least get back to attempting the regulation of wealth as almost every prior society did.