People are rightly alarmed at the accumulation of large amounts of wealth by individual men, which sometimes eclipses the budgets of entire countries. For example, Jeff Bezos wealth ($243.8 billion) exceeds the government budgets of Finland, Iceland, Estonia, and Latvia combined ($227.64B)
No civilisation has an interest in allowing private individuals to rival the power of of a state, let alone multiple states. It puts pressure on states to negotiate where they once could legislate. The fact that the EU must now ask US techlords permission to enforce its own technology laws is evidence that the threat is no longer hypothetical.
In the name of fairness, something needs to be said about billionaires’ wealth: it is largely fictive: it is the stock market valuation of their companies. Their wealth fluctuates up or down by millions of dollars every hour. This leads us to the second observation: their wealth is basically the weighted votes of stock market investors. Their wealth is not money in the bank. Their wealth is rather some kind of consensus among people who can give consent.
There are two secondary problems that are quite real: the first is that billionaires leverage their wealth into untaxable income. This serves no purpose with respect to the civilisations that allow it.
The second is their ability to divert that income to anti-civilisation political parties. Think about it: Billionaires only support parties that are hostile to rule of law. If the principle of democracy is one person, one vote, then this is an assault on democracy and the nature of their preferences are an assault on civilisation.
If billionaires are hostile to democracy and rule of law, it is for good reason: Democracy and rule of law provide them nothing that they cannot provide themselves. They use private schools, private hospitals, even private police. The only thing that civilisation can provide are laws, regulations, fines and fees. Billionaires rightly hold civilisation in contempt. Unsurprisingly, they use their media influence to denigrate particular governments and to present some non-billionaires as enemies of other non-billionaires, in order to keep non-billionaires from realising that billionaires are their primary enemy.
Civilisation has no interest in allowing billionaires to exist. It is likely that epic amounts of private wealth are compatible only with some form of feudalism and are incompatible with civilisation as we know it. Billionaires might have rights to their money, they might be morally justified a hundred times over about their use of power. However, this is not a question of morality and fairness. This is a question of natural selection. If a civilisation collapses or regresses to an earlier state, then it is not here to make judgements about morality and fairness. Once civilisation is gone, there is only power. Let us therefore never discuss the political rights of billionaires. Let them have only the rights accorded by constitutions, and constitutions might survive.
