A society that allows billionaires to exist is immoral

I’ m an old school democratic socialist. I’m more concerned about disparities of power than wealth. But billionaires are a symptom of an unequal system. It’s a system that has allowed a handful of people to accumulate an oversized role in the lives of others and their autonomy. It gives the wealthy unfair influence of the average person’s ability to participate in our democratic structures.

Wealth construction may not be a zero- sum game. But on the shop floor, for instance, of a workplace in our democracy, power and autonomy are. The Democratic Party nomination race exemplifies this. There are two billionaires among the last batch of democratic contenders vying for the most powerful office in the land — Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer. And Bloomberg and Steyer are both in that competitive field mostly due to the merits of their wealth. They have millions upon millions of dollars to spend, whereas the other candidates, even more moderate candidates like Joe Biden, have to try to assemble money from small donors, from the rich, and consumer PACS.

This in itself shows a problem with billionaires in our society. It’s a violation of the democratic principle of one person, one vote. It threatens to undermine our political democracy. Bloomberg is a classic definition of an oligarch in that he is someone who is ideologically flexible, who has hopped from party to party, has personal business interests, and is using his billions of dollars to try to influence our political process. So it’s not just about the old socialist dream of extending political democracy into social and economic spheres. It’s a threat to our very minimal political democracy that exists today and all the gains of the past.

Can you imagine a social democratic system functioning and thriving and producing a certain group of people who are making billions of dollars? Unless you have a maximum income rate, unless you have a massive wealth tax, then yes, hypothetically we could have a system that produces billionaires. But that’s a very different society than the type of society that has created Michael Bloomberg, that has created Tom Steyer, and is creating dozens of new billionaires in the United States. That society is one that is giving us a tremendous amount of child poverty, more than any other rich nation on Earth. It’s giving us tens of millions of uninsured people. It’s giving us the opioid epidemic and a lot of the poverty and desperation that you’re seeing amid tremendous riches.

Maybe there could be a country or a particular labour market where someone like a longshoreman, whose skills are so high in demand, is making $ 10 million a year and could retire one day with a billion

IT THREATENS TO UNDERMINE OUR POLITICAL DEMOCRACY.

dollars in savings. Would that be immoral? Absolutely not.

My problem is less with the sheer number and the amount of wealth, so much as the outside influence of this group of people and the role that they’re playing in our society. If you want this rhetoric against billionaires to end, if you want this angst about wealth inequality to end, the very least you should try do is offering the American people a broader, more expansive safety net beneath them.

Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin magazine and a Guardian US columnist. He is the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality Listen to the whole episode on billionaires at www. munkdebates. com/ podcast/ billionaires