Imagine attending a community banquet given in honor of a prominent citizen. Once the emcee delivers introductory remarks, food service begins. Soon it becomes obvious that each diner receives a baked potato and a chicken wing. Except for the guest of honor. He or she gets a billion baked potatoes and 75 million grilled chickens. Okay, it is nearly impossible to visualize the amount of one billion potatoes. Suffice it that that many spuds and chickens would fill the banquet hall and spill out the door and fill the parking lot. That many potatoes and clucks would fill an NFL stadium to the last row in the nose-bleed section. That many taters and chickens would feed a large portion of the world’s poor and hungry. Put another way, a billion minutes equals about 1,900 years.
This illustration may be silly and unfathomable, I admit. Still, it leads to a question: why should we glorify those who upsell and gather the biggest pile of goodies while paying little or no taxes, those who have co-opted time and labor of thousands of employees, those who eat and live large only to brush crumbs from their tables? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive congresswoman from New York, argued: “No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars.”
If you have a billion dollars, you get VIP treatment wherever you go, whatever you do. Should we care what books Bill Gates is reading? Should we smile at the notion that Jeff Bezos requested that the bridge De Hef in Rotterdam be dismantled so he could float his 127 meters super yacht out to sea? Billionaires, it seems, have a fondness for super yachts, vessels that support helicopters and submarines. Is it okay for Michael Bloomberg to use his giant wealth to overthrow political enemies? He was willing to spend, “whatever it takes” to oust Trump during the last election cycle. Well done, Michael, but is that okay? Certainly, an endless stream of money might influence an election outcome. If I had billions, I guess I could choose the next president of the country if I blitzed voters with the right malarky. We really do not have a well-crafted democracy; we have a pay-to-play system of choosing elected officials. Should we concern ourselves with Elon Musk’s latest acquisitions and pronouncements? He surely draws attention. A recent poll (Emerson College on “FiveThirtyEight”) published a hypothetical 2024 presidential race between Elon Musk and Mark Cuban. Besides money, what do those two have to offer? The poll was a tease, I know, but why should we turn our attention to two billionaires, one not eligible because he was born outside the US to two non-citizens of this country, the other qualified as a host of a television show and an owner a basketball team. What? Does celebrity status wedge them into position of vying for president? Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump demonstrated it does. I want to say, “Give me a break.” But I don’t qualify because billionaires are the ones who get breaks for no other reason than the bottom line on their bank accounts.
Want to spend some mad money? Hell, yes. You might want to buy an island. Larry Ellison of the Oracle Corporation owns 98% of the Hawaiian island Lanai. That’s 98% of the whole island. The other 2% apparently is owned by the state of Hawaii. How about purchasing a professional sports team? A newspaper? A private jet? A dozen homes around the world? Nineteen golf courses? A private art collection that only a select few may enjoy? A spacecraft hobby? Goodness, yes. Plant your flag on Mars and say, “Dibs.” If you somehow gathered all the money, you could own everything.
Billionaires stockpile wealth that others create. That is how it is done. Walmart employs over two million workers worldwide. Sam Walton’s family became wickedly rich by using the labor of minimum wage earners. Billionaires benefit from the labors of others. That’s the way the economic system works. One person at the top of the pyramid owns the whole mountain of stones. That person does not have to stand in line. The others down the pecking order receive increasingly smaller shares according to their rank, usually the lower the status the smaller the pay. That’s our system. That’s how we do it. Any questions?
Why should we admire those at the top of the heap? What’s to admire? Question: is it possible to ethically have a billion dollars in a country where over half a million people are homeless? Somewhere above 40 million people in America live below the poverty line according to the United States Census Bureau. It is estimated that there about 725 billionaires in America. Juxtapose that number to the roughly 40 million poor among us. Hmm, does that sound like America? Yup, sure does. And most of us are proud of it. Perhaps you haven’t said it, but you probably thought it: “Let those people get a job and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”
For a healthy, stable society such a discrepancy between uber rich and dire poverty cannot continue. On some level, we all know that. In such a world is it possible to be profanely rich and ethical at the same time? I have the answer. Go ahead, guess.
Put aside notions of socialism and capitalism and all other isms, and simply consider societal damage when a few people corner wealth. According to Bernie Sanders, “The top 1% now has more wealth than the entire middle class. Does that make sense to anyone? No, I am not a socialist or a radical lefty. I am a voice for economic survival, for the wellbeing of everyone.
I’d rather follow the lessons found in the nine Beatitudes than those found in J. Paul Getty’s book, How to Be Rich.