Imagine you got paid one million dollars a year. That’s over $2,500 a day. You can work as much or as little as you want, you still get one million dollars every year. No taxes, no strings attached. That’s $1,000,000 every year.
After the first year, you have $1,000,000. You’re wealthy. With good investments, you could get $50,000 - $100,000 a year in interest and dividends. You probably still work, but you love comfortably. But it’s nowhere close to a billion.
After 10 years, you have $10,000,000. You’re very wealthy. You can live off of investment income alone. You probably have a personal secretary. And it’s still only 1% of a billion.
After 100 years, you would have $100,000,000 dollars. You can talk to A list celebrities and sports stars. You probably have a yacht and multiple large homes. You have multiple staff to manage your day to day life. Now you’re at 10% of a billion.
After 500 years, you would have $500,000,000. You’re richer than most people. And your only at 1/2 a billion.
After 1,000 years you finally have a billion dollars.
Some people have multiple billions of dollars. Billionaires should not exist.
2. The law of the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes
It’s helpful to think of billionaires not as individuals but as enterprises. A billionaire consists of a whole ecosystem that extends far beyond the individual. A network of mandarins, sycophants, and other functionaries, drawn to, supported by, and answerable to the billionaire’s capital.
Ok. But how rich are billionaires put in a guillotine?
Wealth inequality is outrageous but the greater crime is in capitalism’s coercion and deprivation. Look at where it directs our immense oroductive forces, the jobs it makes you take, the people it starves, the earth it salts. Instead of keeping our planet livable by decarbonizing, capitalism commits genocide and makes you a participant. Instead of ensuring food for all it has you work as a redundant cog in a finance scheme to grift money off of people that need healthcare. Instead of letting people simply live independently in their own nation it demands their subjugation and death and bombing lest they interrupt their profitability, and you are given the option of building the bomb, servicing the bomb builders, or being one or two steps removed by business contracts. What is stolen in these ways is a far greater amount of wealth than any billionaire possesses, they are just the few who took on the sociopathic role of top-down profit maximizer. Much of what is stolen is an extinction. It is qualitative and cannot be restored. There are tribes snuffed out, their language and stories and people dead, for profit maximization. Aquifers that could sustain millions poisoned.
