Confiscate Their Money
Taxing billionaires out of existence must become a mainstream idea.
One of the privileges of great wealth is the ability to pretend that spending it amounts to a job. For the pharma executives Calvin and Orsula Knowlton, that spare job was the planning and construction of a $27 million New Jersey mansion, complete with an indoor pub and an elevator to the his-and-hers gym and an underground tunnel leading to the planned auto gallery. The religious couple also installed a chapel in the mansion, a home they did not often spend time in, because they had others. How they squared their allegiance to the Bible with their superfluous $27 million palace was not discussed.
For Daren Metropoulos, the 41-year-old son of a private equity titan, the fake job has been a decade spent buying up $326 million of luxury homes, which can be referred to as “assembling a real estate portfolio.” Metropoulos, who has worked only for companies that his dad owns, has bought up the Playboy Mansion and Mandarin Oriental condos in New York and a Martha’s Vineyard compound and waterfront homes in Hawaii and Miami Beach. Most recently, he paid $148 million cash for a Palm Beach estate. These “all will be used as personal residences,” the Wall Street Journal notes. The wealth that Metropoulos will earn on his vast portfolio of mansions is simply proof that in America, hard work pays off.
Of course, even this is child’s play compared to the holdings of a real billionaire. Ken Griffin, for example, the Citadel hedge fund billionaire, has a $122 million pied-a-terre in London, a $238 million apartment in Manhattan, and is currently building himself a $1 billion home in Florida. One cannot expect hardworking men like this to be forced to shelter in the vile confines of a “hotel.”
One of the foundational operating principles of the United States of America is that no one can ever be deemed to have too much wealth. It’s odd, if you think about it. There is no upper limit—a man with more money than he could spend in ten lifetimes can go right on adding billions of dollars to his pile, wealth that could change millions of lives for the better but which means nothing to him other than the movement of a few digits on his acccounts. No law or agency is empowered to say that he has too much. Yet it is certainly possible to have too little wealth. If you have no money, you will be denied housing and you will be denied quality health care and you will be denied food and respect and when you are put in jail you will be denied bail. This seems, by a common sense version of morality, exactly backwards. Our lack of an upper wealth limit is evidence of a land where rich people write the laws.
The United States government should confiscate the wealth of the very rich. Their wealth is symbolically grotesque, unnecessary for them to have, needed more by others, and, most importantly, allowing such wealth to pool into such a small number of hands warps our political system and our society at large in incredibly harmful ways. Rather than populist politicians grumbling about billionaires and railing at the way that they exert undue influence over all of our lives, the government should tax all individual wealth over, let’s say, $999 million at 100%. Democratic governments should not wage PR battles against billionaires. They should eradicate them.
This should be the bedrock position of, at the very least, the party representing the left-most half of the American electorate. The fact that this sort of idea is considered completely outside of serious mainstream debate is a galling failure of America’s moral vision. I know that this is the sort of thing that gets bandied around as a slogan, as revolutionary chant, as a utopian dream. That is not what I am suggesting here. I am suggesting that this should be in the Democratic Party platform. Yes, I understand the barriers that money in politics and rich donors pose to such a thing happening. But history shows again and again that moral demands that will fix a terrible flaw plaguing all of society can in fact migrate into mainstream politics even if they harm a particular interest group. The first step to achieving this is to begin creating a consensus among normal people that billionaires should not exist. There is a process that all political ideas must go through before they are achieved. Just because there are barriers in the way does not mean that the underlying idea is not just and necessary. This particular idea has the benefit of being both necessary to the survival of a functioning democracy, and almost completely walled off from entry to the Land of Serious Policy Discussion. That means that every intellectual and pundit and activist individual and group who picks up this idea and makes the case for it is building the foundation of its success in a way that will feel really good when it is achieved.
The first and most practical objection to confiscating the wealth of billionaires is simply that billionaires will use their wealth to prevent it from happening. That means than any political effort along these lines will meet with an enormous outpouring of spending on every last manner of assault on it. Astroturf groups, free market think tanks, huge donations to right wing politicians, massive PR campaigns, and on and on. (The current Supreme Court justices who won their seats as a result of a 40-year-long investment by business interests in getting them there can be placed in this category as well.) So? This is politics. It is always this way. Do not talk yourself out of a good idea because someone will oppose it.
Vacuous Democratic political strategists will say: That plan will get you branded as communists! So? The Republican party will always brand Democrats as communists no matter what. Hell, they branded Bill Clinton as a communist. You can’t try to create your own economic policy platform based on what you think your opponents will say about you. Kamala Harris, to give a relevant example, has proposed a tax on unrealized capital gains for people who are worth more than $100 million. This policy—a 25% annual tax on appreciation of assets for those worth $100 million—is quite mild compared to a 100% wealth tax on people worth $1 billion, though both would affect only a tiny number of people: the U.S. has around 10,000 people worth $100 million, and fewer than 800 billionaires. Harris’ mild tax on a tiny number of Americans is, as you might expect, already being presented by Republicans and their allies as just “a tax on unrealized gains,” leaving off the part where it does not apply to any of the normal non-centimillionaires who will be freaked out by the thought of paying more taxes on the homes they own. Republicans will continue to lie and fearmonger about this. They would do the same if you came for the wealth of billionaires. In other words, this is a normal political communications issue.
What does someone who is worth $30 billion lose if you take $29 billion from them? They can still own multiple mansions and a private jet and buy any material thing they want and leave a fortune behind when they die that will take care of their family for generations. As a practical matter of day to day life, they lose nothing. All they really lose is the ability to unduly influence the rest of us. They lose (some of) their ability to act like gods. They are less able to buy governments and exert their will regardless of laws and change cities to suit their whims and generally make all of the other humans on earth into bit players in a play that they write every day entitled “My Own Personal Preferences.” They are forced—ever so slightly!—to live in a world in which a single person cannot just, you know, purchase an entire island for the purpose of building himself an apocalypse bunker, or spend $44 billion to fuck up an important social media platform in order to force more people to read his corny jokes. All of these people would still be fabulously rich. All of them could still live lives of unimaginable luxury. But the situation in which five billionaires have more wealth than billions of other people on earth combined would be mitigated.
This would be a good thing. This policy would be in the public interest.
Billionaires’ ability to get richer with no upper limit has gotten the billionaires themselves into a bit of a pickle. They have gotten so rich that the cartoonish gap between them and the rest of us becomes ever harder to ignore. They have so many resources at their disposal that their power now exceeds that of most private institutions and rivals that of governments. They are a threat to democracy because they are so powerful. If they had all stopped at $999 million, they could still live out their dreams, but the distribution of economic and political power in this country would not be so warped that entire global companies and cities and states can be disrupted when a single rich idiot throws a tantrum. The billionaires have gotten too successful for their own good. They arranged the system to enrich themselves and it has worked so well that, at this point, it is quite clear that allowing it to continue is an existential threat to any nation that prefers not to be an outright oligarchy. Let the billionaires cry and shout.
They are rich, but they are few. There are more of us. Many, many more.
Just confiscate their money. Just make that the baseline policy. Just establish as a widely accepted principle that nobody needs to have a billion (one thousand million) dollars. It is insane. Snap out of it. It’s not shocking that this situation of wealth inequality exists—this is the natural functioning of capitalism, and it works fiercely to achieve this very end—but it is shocking that so many people have been successfully brainwashed into tolerating it for so long. Frogs in a pot. The wealth of the richest Americans climbs, from tens of billions of dollars to hundreds of billions of dollars, and yet the ability to get the general public to consider this a mark of a healthy economy persists. Wealth does truly buy fantastic propaganda. But let’s stop bullshitting here. Higher taxes are all well and good, but the level of inequality we have reached is too deep rooted. It must be lopped off right where the growth begins.
Confiscate their money. Then redistribute it to normal people! Build schools and hospitals! Pay for public health care! Build new parks in every state! Send regular Americans a check! Give people a material stake in this. Counterbalance the inevitable teary wails about all the hard work they put in. These are all ways to bolster support for this action. They are just a sweetener, though. The real prize is: no more billionaires. The sooner that The Responsible People stop treating this as a wild-eyed socialist dream and realize that it is necessary for the survival of America, the sooner we can stop having to give a fuck about what billionaires want. It can’t come too soon.
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Related: Who Is Your Enemy, My Brother?; Class War USA; We’re All Mice Trying to Chew Through a Trillion-Dollar Tree.
The key to creating the conditions necessary to bring about these kinds of changes is: making organized labor stronger. I wrote a book about this very thing. It’s called “The Hammer,” and you can order it wherever books are sold. And right now, in honor of Labor Day, I am still on book tour. If I am in your area, come out and see me! My upcoming events:
Saturday, August 31: Wheeling, West Virginia. I’ll be speaking at the Reuther-Pollack Labor History Symposium at 11 a.m. Tickets and event info here.
Thursday, September 5: Las Vegas, Nevada. At The Writer’s Block at 7 pm. In conversation with Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Union. Event link here.
Wednesday, September 25: St. Augustine, Florida. I’ll be speaking at Flagler College in the evening. Event link to come.
Thursday, September 26: Gainesville, Florida. At The Lynx Books at 6 pm. In conversation with labor activist Candi Churchill. Event link here.
Sunday, September 29: Brooklyn, NY. At the Brooklyn Book Festival.
Finally, let me say thank you to everyone who subscribes to How Things Work. This publication has existed for more than a year only because of the financial support of readers just like you. If like reading this site and would like for it to continue to exist, please take a second right now to become a paid subscriber. Independent media is a truth machine: If people like it enough to pay for it, it will exist, and if not, it won’t. I believe we can be around for a long time, if everyone who can afford to chips in a little bit. Hell yeah.
Money makes money with no effort. Labor makes money but is limited by time. I don’t know why we don’t tax wages at a very low amount and tax capital gains at a higher amount - particularly above certain levels. Put THAT tax plan in front of working folks. And, BTW, as a resident of Switzerland, I had to pay a tax on my worldwide wealth. Very rich nations do this.
I'd tweek the headline a bit: "Confiscate OUR Money From The Thieving Billionaires".
They didn't "earn" it, and they definitely aren't "worth" it.
Billionaires? Our kids can't afford 'em.