The Good Billionaire

Why are so many people unhappy in the richest country the world has ever seen? Why are the peoples of many countries that aren't as rich often happier? We know the answer to those questions; poverty is relative. That means we measure our own wealth against the wealth of those within our own society, our own country; it's the gap between the rich and poor in our own society that determines if we feel poor or not.

Yes, absolute poverty exists as there is an income level below which we simply can not survive, or live a decent life. But the feeling of being poor, the emotions related to that relative poverty - like envy and anger towards "the rich" - are rooted in the ever growing gap between a society's richest and poorest. That's why people are much less unhappy in countries with a much more egalitarian income and wealth distribution, like in the social democracies of the Scandinavian countries. In America however, the three richest men own as much wealth as the bottom 160 million citizens. That country has the best of all worlds; it's so big that it contains within its borders almost every natural resource needed to make everything needed for comfortable lifes, and it's isolated enough to not have to fear an invasion. Otto von Bismarck once said: "The Americans are a very lucky people. They're bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors, and to the east and west by fish."

I would disagree with Bismarck because "luck" has nothing to do with it; Europeans, mainly the English and Dutch, have invaded the continent, all but exterminated its indigenous people and imported slaves to lay the base for its relative wealth in the world, on top of being the only rich western country to not have to rebuild after the two World Wars. America even "helped" western Europe rebuild after the Second World War with the Marshall Plan, which was actually a clever scheme of giant loans under the conditions that the money was used exclusively to buy American products, further boosting America's own economic growth. This sort of self-serving conditions still exist today in international "aide" given through institutions like the World Bank and the IMF; there is no true charity in the for profit capitalist economy.

And that's where the "good billionaire" enters today's story. In the many discussions about whether billionaires should even exist, and about the wealth inequality that's reached levels never before seen in all of human history, not even in the times of the pharaohs, progressive's arguments against the existence of billionaires are crushed by the existence, or even the possibility of the existence of the "good billionaire". That is a billionaire who gives huge amounts of money to charities and even advocates for higher taxation of his class. If such billionaires exist or can exist, it can always be argued that capitalism isn't all bad. This is why, in my humble opinion, the only argument against the existence of billionaires, and the consequent immeasurable gap between rich and poor, is the socialist argument rooted in the labor theory of value; no one person can create billions worth of wealth, and all wealth, all value is created through the labor necessary to convert raw materials into usable products. Marx's critique of capitalism is quite brilliant and many more people should acquaint themselves with it. To get you started, here's a short video explaining the socialist argument against billionaires, even the good ones:

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