What to Do With the Rich: Addressing the Billionaire Question
5/18/25
By: Daniel Miller
The class designation of “billionaire” is often falsely believed to be someone who has that much money stashed away like Scrooge McDuck in the classic series DuckTales. A billionaire is someone who has at least that much money in total assets, such as stocks, real estate, business holdings, and other investments, not necessarily cash in the bank. A common trope in a sea of misrepresentations by many hysterical and willfully ignorant conservative media figures is that anyone who dares criticize the insane greed and wealth concentration by the nation’s highest earners is against wealth in general.
Frequent swings from the hip of this nature are occasionally hurled at lefties, socialists, and progressives such as Senator Bernie Sanders for owning not one, not two, but three whole houses! He and his lovely wife Jane collectively own one four-bedroom house in his home state of Vermont, a one-bedroom apartment in Washington, D.C., for obvious reasons, and a four-bedroom lakefront cabin at Lake Champlain, all acquired through conventional means such as mortgages, book royalties, and personal savings. In other words, one of the least-wealthiest Senators – worth a whopping $3 million, far less than many who would be considered blue-collar workers by any standard – amassed his wealth in far more virtuous fashion than every pro-genocidal whore who smiles as they open their bags for the Zionist AIPAC money.
The same can be said for virtually every billionaire who calls the US home, as it’s an open secret and at times a litigated fact that many of them and the higher-ups in their companies have stolen wages and mistreated those who made their fortunes possible. At the start of 2025, the US alone had 813 billionaires worth approximately $6.72 trillion – with a “t” – and almost three-quarters of a million homeless people and counting. A broken system is one that lets the downtrodden fall through the cracks while the elites are engaged in a personal space race. Wealth inequality hasn’t been this bad since the Gilded Age, and it’s only getting worse every day the tawny, bloated fascist remains in office and Republicans control all three branches of government. It’s time for stubborn libertarians to finally acknowledge that the unregulated free market was the cause of this problem, and therefore can in no way be the cure, because the corrupt, extremist Republican Party never will.
The monopolization of industry and the concentration of key markets, paired with the government’s promise to bail them out when things get rough, are antithetical to the vision of capitalism they highly extol in the first place. While the barriers to entering the competitive market are relatively low, giving people the impression that nobody or nothing except themselves is to blame if their new enterprise doesn’t work out for them, those at the top are always there to ensure that the competition never grows big enough to challenge their market dominance.
Rapacious corporations have lost many antitrust lawsuits in the past, with two of the most prominent cases in the twentieth century having been Standard Oil and AT&T, after it was determined that they were engaging in unfair and predatory business practices. After the AT&T case, antitrust laws started becoming weaker as crackpot economists such as Robert Bork from the loathsome and fanatical Chicago School of Economics lobbied that monopolies were acceptable as long as they kept consumer prices low. Every important industry, ranging from tech, e-commerce, telecommunications, agriculture, banking, and the airlines, is controlled by one to three companies in their respective fields. The goal for a lot of tech startups these days is to do well enough that they catch the eyes of the bigger players so they can simply sell out. Doing so is much easier than fighting a losing battle.
If the US can manage to withstand the fascist freaks currently attempting to fundamentally restructure the way the country functions, the progressive presidential successor will have a lot of work on their hands. The first steps that need to be taken are the strengthening and enforcement of antitrust laws, redistributing wealth, and heavily taxing future profits, with the money going into the hands of small business owners so they can give their employees a raise and restructure their operations to eventually transition away from subsidies. The right predictably claim that any of the ideas I talk about here are communist, but anything remotely left of center is considered communism to the smoothbrains who are serious about making that claim.
Contrary to what they want the public to believe, the minimum wage was established in 1938 by President Franklin Roosevelt as a “living wage”—enough to make a “decent living,” as he announced five years earlier. You can pay me a low wage to do a job, but you have to pay me extra to care about the quality. I want to be excited to come to work instead of calculating if it’s even possible to work enough hours so I can afford both rent and enough groceries for three healthy meals a day. It’s not a moral failing by the worker that the only job available doesn’t pay a decent wage; it’s a moral failing on the employer for refusing to treat the worker with dignity. Instead, low-wage workers are viewed as lazy and unable to contribute to society, even if given the chance.
Workers who chose to stay home during the pandemic were berated relentlessly by the heavily influential right-wing media, which was then amplified across social media. The racist trope by President Reagan about the welfare queen four decades ago has now vilified every low-income individual who receives any kind of government assistance as lazy moochers, while ignoring Elon Musk receiving over $8 billion a day in government subsidies as he retweets white supremacist accounts all day. He is the biggest welfare queen in American history, yet he’s viewed as a super genius by people who pay him for the ability to write a few extra words at a time, coming to his defense in Twitter arguments.
Strengthening unions is essential and could, in theory, render the minimum wage obsolete while still remaining as a safety net. Some Scandinavian countries have no minimum wage because the unions are so strong that they allow for sectoral bargaining, meaning fast food workers receive a different guaranteed base pay rate than, say, construction workers. Libertarians and the entire Republican Party are either against raising the minimum wage any higher than an insulting $7.25 an hour or are against having one entirely. The same party that claims to support the working man is also against strengthening unions or giving them any kind of bargaining power over their employer. Those weasely frauds will posture defiantly as they defend their position from a philosophical – albeit a lazy – viewpoint, corruption is the true reason why. They’re paid to represent the business class, not the working one.
The fourth is to implement a marginal tax rate similar to what it was throughout the mid-twentieth century, which was around 90 percent, during the “golden years of economic expansion” in the country. Back when it was actually “great” by economic standards, but not so much for social issues. One doesn’t have to think too deeply to figure out that Trump’s recycled slogan harkens back to a time of deep wealth inequality and institutions that only existed to protect a white supremacist version of the country.
Anyone whose net worth reaches $999,999,999 should, from then on, receive a plaque that says “Congratulations, you win capitalism!” with a stretch of toll roads named after them so they can at least pretend that people are still giving them money. When recently asked if he was concerned about future price hikes due to his idiotic tariff proposals, President Trump let his contempt for the working class show by saying that “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of thirty dolls.’ With comments like that, it’s time to tax the hell out of them and inflict harsh penalties over the tax evasion schemes many have admitted to committing.
The fifth step is to transition into some kind of system that distributes universal basic income. This idea is as American as Thomas Paine, a great but forgotten Founder of the country who would be considered a radical in some aspects even by today’s standards, when he proposed a nascent version of the idea, viewing it as a moral imperative. In his 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice, Paine argued that ownership of land and control of resources deprived others of what was also rightfully theirs, over two decades before Karl Marx was even born. To counter this inevitable problem, instead of shrugging his shoulders and saying “That’s just the way it is, I guess,” he argued that landowners should instead have to pay rent on the land that would go into a sovereign wealth fund. The money in the pool would then be distributed to every person who turned 21, and an annual amount to everyone 50 years and older. Nothing exorbitant, just enough for some meager assistance.
But this idea was also proposed well before the concept of automation, a serious issue that isn’t being properly addressed by those in power. The issue of wealth disparity and automation is no longer just a philosophical debate; it’s a reality that most jobs will inevitably be replaced by robots that don’t mind working for free, and I’m afraid we will suffer the consequences of procrastination and unserious deliberation. I think that these ideas are much more humane than the other options, which seem to echo the early days of the French Revolution.
