What if…. we abolished billionaires?

In many West-owned cities, where extreme wealth has increased to unprecedented levels, calls to abolish billionaires have become popular or at least slow their growth.

Elon Musk’s pay award of a potential $1 trillion in November will make the Tesla owner not just the richest person in the world, which he already is. Musk will become the richest person in history if he receives the full compensation package.

According to Forbes magazine, Musk would surpass the world’s other billionaires, who are thought to be worth $ 16 trillion, to reach a record number of such figures.

Since the beginning of Western imperialism, the distinction between the world’s rich and poor has never been more obvious.

Currently, about 831 million people live at or below the level of extreme poverty across the globe. When adjusted for currency and cost of living, that is $3 per day, according to the World Bank.

In fact, if every billionaire had to name their own, the rest of their seized wealth would be sufficient to cover the $ 196 billion that UN experts believe will be required to end world extreme poverty for the next 196 years.

According to some analysts and economists, the wealth owned by billionaires can skew the world’s politics, media, and even the way we think, to reflect the interests of the super-rich.

Others contend that this extraordinary wealth benefits the global economy by ensuring that the world’s innovators and creators have the funding to advance cutting-edge technology and innovation.

What if we abolished the world’s billionaires, redistributed their wealth, or set a cap on people’s earnings below a billion dollars?

What would that look like? Would we have a different perspective on the world? Would our institutions change, or would we all lose the top investors and wealth creators around the world?

We asked some of the world’s leading economists and social campaigners for their opinions.

Innovation would it stop?

The demise of billionaires is a ridiculous idea, and if it were to occur in a fantasy world, our developed economies would suffer in complete disarray.

The vast majority of billionaires in the West created the immense wealth that they now own … simply through the creation of products, services, and other items which we as a society have freely purchased.

“Billionaires” refer to people who own more than $1 billion in assets, including shares in businesses, IP rights, land, property, or tangible goods. They do not have a pool of gold bullion or a bank pile of 1 billion dollar bills, which is theoretical.

Many of the billionaires we know may be worth a billion today or a million tomorrow, depending on how these shares or IP perform. Although it may seem elementary, it is significant.

Billionaires have a natural desire to increase their wealth and, consequently, to develop profitable, problem-solving businesses.

See SpaceX, which opened up satellite communication for everyone and benefits us all, or Nvidia, which issues shares to its employees and is at the forefront of the AI revolution.

Let’s change this: If billionaires were to be eliminated, these extraordinary individuals would no longer have the resources to solve these issues, we all would lose our relevance, and problems would still exist.

That would be a terrible thing for society.

Adam Smith Institute director of public affairs Maxwell Marlow

What if the wealth was distributed fairly?

Billionaires need to be taxed — but from the perspective of the Global South, the real question is where.

First of all, it shouldn’t be confused with distribution in the Robin Hood style. Second, does the place where their wealth was actually created reflect where they are taxed if they are only taxed in their country of residence?

Wealth is not produced solely by investment. It relies on both labor and resources. The Global South accounts for a large portion of the global economy today. It follows, then, that tax revenues should also flow back to the places from which that wealth is extracted.

Consider Antwerp. Residents of this beautiful city enjoy high living standards. But the foundations of that prosperity lie in diamonds from the]Democratic Republic of the] Congo, where living standards have barely risen. Why do we experience these various outcomes? It’s not about giving back to charity; rather, it’s about changing global finance to make it fair.

Inequality has surged over the past 30 to 40 years. According to what amounts to a consensus that such concentrations of wealth were unhealthy and that the money was better devoted to the welfare, education, and health, than the kind we currently see, were taxed at 97 to 98 percent in the form of high marginal tax rates above a threshold.

Today, in moments of economic crisis, governments often impose austerity, pushing the burden onto the poor and middle class. That change is novel.

Not just new billionaire taxes are required, but structural change is also necessary. Otherwise, we face an existential problem if we leave the structures that reproduce inequality intact: individuals whose wealth gives them more power than many governments.

Extreme wealth is concentrating, gaining political power, and establishing an oligarchic system that can be reincarnated throughout the world, including in the Global South, where a lot of it comes from.

To get rid of cholera, take into account the Millennium Development Goal. The vaccine costs about $2. By how many people are at risk, and how likely the disease will vanish.

However, that is not how it works. Without changing living conditions, people remain exposed. Redistributing must continue in the same way: it must alter both structures and not just transfer funds.

Global Alliance for Tax Justice executive coordinator Dereje Alemayehu

Would regulations need to change?

I can guarantee that there will be a new class of billionaires by the following week if the billionaires are eliminated tomorrow.

The result of policy failure is a billionaire. It is absurd that they exist at all, yet the system is designed to enable precisely this concentration of wealth. It was built to serve the interests of billionaires rather than to promote equality, sustainability, or environmental justice.

Many of my progressive colleagues discuss how billionaires should be taxed to pay for public needs like healthcare and environmental reforms. But that misses the core problem.

Consider lowering the price of healthcare by taxing alcohol or cigarettes. The logic becomes perverse: the more people smoke or drink, the more revenue you have.

The same holds true for billionaires. The “tiny little slice” of tax we rely on is the more wealth we give them. In effect, we end up asking billionaires for permission to fund the public good.

We must regulate their outlawship if we want to eliminate billionaires. It is no coincidence that antitrust laws in the West have been around for a long time. These laws allow billionaires to flourish.

We require modern regulation, and spending decisions must be kept from both regulation and taxation.

Only then do we have a chance to create a just, inclusive, and fair society that upholds the values of its citizens.

Fadhel Kaboub, associate professor of economics at Denison University, president of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, and author of Global South Perspectives on Substack.

A number of interconnected issues are raised by the idea of merely removing billionaires.

First of all, it is not a hypothetical that billionaires would own the media. It has long existed … but today we have individuals who can buy entire media platforms outright, simply because they have the cash. Consider Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

Naturally, this affects the sources of information and the decision-makers.

Second, billionaires sometimes claim they are rescuing news organisations and supporting journalism, but that commitment lasts only as long as their own interests go unchallenged and as long as they find it personally profitable or useful.

For instance, Musk has allegedly corrupted Twitter and one of the world’s most significant platforms in order to pursue his political agenda.

It is crucial to keep in mind that access to information is ultimately what matters when controlling the media is concerned. That is why you very rarely see meaningful scrutiny of the interests of media owners themselves.

Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre co-director Des Freedman

Is extreme wealth still present?

Across much of the West, wealth and power are becoming increasingly concentrated. There are also compelling arguments to think that the concentration era may be coming to an end.

Extreme wealth concentrations have already been curbed, but they are not new. In the 1910s, the US broke the conglomerate of John D Rockefeller — then the world’s richest man and effectively the tech giant of his era. Then, in 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed a 94 percent top tax rate on extreme incomes.

Roosevelt also helped finance the New Deal, which is often credited with pulling the US out of the Great Depression.

In a time of growing economic discontent, increasing transparency has rekindled opposition to extreme wealth. Much of the opacity surrounding it has been removed thanks to revelations like the Panama Papers and LuxLeaks. In France, serious proposals to tax billionaires and centi-millionaires now command broad political support. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has put a strong emphasis on taxing the super-rich in the G20. When is the issue now, rather than whether the wealthy can be taxed?

Winning that argument will not be easy. However, it has already triumphed, just like income tax, which was once criticized as being Marxist. Additionally, shifting some of the super-rich’s wealth would undermine many traditionalist narratives about the West’s abundance of scarce resources.

Those narratives have prospered partly because progressive calls for redistribution have lacked the necessary weight, enabling an alliance of the right and billionaire interests to push xenophobia to the fore.

Source: Aljazeera