Aspirational Wealth: Who Wants To Be A Billionaire?
And why nobody should. They shouldn't even exist
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. We worship wealth.
Poverty is so often regarded as a failing of morality or work ethic, an issue of personal responsibility. In some cases that may be true, but in a system where the value ascribed to your life is based on numbers in bank accounts, it’s hard to claw your way out of a hole.
The higher the cost of living goes, the more of that precious money drains away from you due to circumstances largely outside of your control. You need to eat. You need gas for your car — assuming you even own one. You need to pay rent, you need medicine and care, you need some form of enjoyment in life.
And no, I don’t consider recreational activities to be something you can just ‘do without.’ What’s the point of living if you have to restrict enjoyment for most of your life just for the hope of living well when you’re old?
Most of us in my generation and younger have no hope of retirement. When exactly are we supposed to experience joy, guys? I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. I’m not going to waste the time I have just slaving away making someone else more money than they pay me for my time, and you shouldn’t expect that of people.
I think people have the right to live, not just scrape a bare meagre survival on scraps.
Since it’s so far out of most of our collective grasp, we tend to fantasize about what life would be like with a world-altering amount of money. I’ve spent plenty of time thinking about how it would feel to pay off all of mine and my spouse’s debts and to have enough money to settle in a house of our own.
People like to say that money doesn’t buy happiness, but it damn sure removes a lot of the obstacles to achieving a good and joyful life. I’d be happier if I never had to worry about paying the bills, and I’m sure you would be, too.
We’d all love to have the total freedom that wealth would bring. The power to truly do whatever you want to do, whatever that is.
The truth of what we’d do tends to reveal a lot about who we are as people. And for people who do have that kind of wealth, there’s no shortage of evidence.
The picture that evidence paints isn’t good.
“When you have enough power to do what you always wanted to do, then you see what the guy always wanted to do.” — Robert Caro
Money is power in our society. And power reveals a lot about who we are.
What we do with it tells you everything you need to know.
Take Elon Musk for example. In 2021, he famously said that if he were given a plan to end world hunger, he would pay for it. He had more than enough money, he could do it in a snap if someone told him how. He swore up and down he would sell his Tesla stock and donate the billions he made to make it work.
The United Nations World Food Programme took him up on it. They made a plan. They published it. It might not have ended world hunger forever, but it would save over 42 million food insecure people from famine and give them a chance they wouldn’t otherwise have.
They answered Musk’s challenge and held out their hands… and they got nothing.
Musk chose to give the money to his own foundation instead.
We see what he does with the power given to him in political circles, too. We saw DOGE. We saw how he gutted USAID. We saw the Nazi salute he felt comfortable enough to make at Trump’s inauguration.
He feels untouchable. He can do whatever he wants and face no consequences.
His very punchable face remains unscathed.
Elon’s a clear example of all of this, but he’s not the only one. How many billionaires are there? Multi-billionaires? People who have the same level of wealth he had when he made that promise.
The plan still exists. The numbers and calculations will have changed, but I’ll bet you could still get pretty far with a few billion. Hell, a handful of them could get together, donate a small fraction of their wealth and still successfully fund the plan without noticing a blip in their savings accounts.
To date, none of them have.
Imagine being able to solve world hunger for a year. Imagine being able to solve issues like homelessness and medical debt in the blink of an eye. Hell, John Oliver made a little dent in that for a gag on his show a while back, buying debt for pennies on the dollar and forgiving it on air.
$15 million in medical debt erased in the blink of an eye. 9,000 people released from the cycle of owing money they couldn’t afford to pay back. That was inspiring to me, and to my spouse — who immediately declared that if we ever strike it rich, that’s what he wants to do for people.
They could do that. They could wipe out debt for tens of millions of people if they felt like it. Just for a lark. They won’t, because it doesn’t even occur to them to do that.
And I know the argument people will respond with. They aren’t obligated to.
Nobody can force you to give up your money; it’s yours to do with as you see fit, and that’s true. I can’t be compelled to donate my savings against my will, and it’s not morally wrong to save cash for a rainy day.
But if you had the power to solve the world’s thorniest, most destructive problems without losing a decimal point in your net worth, wouldn’t you want to?
Wouldn’t that be worth it?
They don’t think so. And that makes sense, because you don’t become a billionaire by having compassion.
In fact, having that extreme level of wealth directly strips empathy out of you as a side effect. That may seem like a bold claim, but I have receipts to back it up.
Billinaires are demonized by every day people like you and me, and that’s largely because they fucking earn it.
They hoard enough wealth for themselves to feed entire cities while the poor starve, live homeless in the streets and beg for charity on GoFundMe.
They get there by being willing to exploit others for their own gain. They step on those below them and force their heads underwater to keep themselves afloat. There’s no such thing as a good billionaire who got there via hard work.
I’m not the only one to write about this, either.
Hell, they don’t even pay their fair share in taxes. And contrary to semi-popular belief, taxes are not theft; they’re the rent we pay to live in a civil society. They only become theft when the government isn’t holding up its end of the deal.
Hi, Trump. You asshole.
As for billionaire philanthropy, don’t get me started. I’ve already been there and vented about that nonsense. Taxes go further and help fund more than a charitable donation aimed at tax deduction.
If you’re going to donate with that much money in your pockets, go big or go home.
Don’t do one of those ‘my company will match every donation my customers make!’ drives. That works for small businesses, not for billionaire-run corporations. Don’t be a jerk, just pay your fair share.
Hoarding wealth is a bad look, but it’s also bad for the economy. Think about it; when you and I get money, we spend it in our communities. We pay the local mechanic to fix our car. We go out to eat at a local restaurant. We get our hair cut, we get ice cream, we shop.
We put that money into the local economy.
What do billionaires do with their money? Do they eat at the local mom-and-pop burger joint? Do they buy a million burgers? Do they go to the local shop for ice cream? Shop downtown?
Or do they pay people to bring them the gourmet stuff from out of town? A private chef, private hair stylist. Billionaires don’t put money into the little things that make a local economy flourish; they put it into the stream of money that pays for the high-end delicacies.
Why pay the mechanic down the road when you can buy a private jet?
From me, $5 generates value well above its actual worth as it passes from hand to hand in my town. In a billionaire’s hands, that $5 just sits in a bank, or it goes into the most exclusive, only-for-the-wealthy kind of businesses.
Billionaires do not contribute to that local economy. They’re a drain on it.
Don’t pull the ‘they create jobs’ line, either. That might be worth something if they paid living wages and treated their workers like human beings rather than slaves. Looking at you, Bezos.
The point is, one wealthy man can’t prop up an economy. But thousands of regular people paid good wages with disposable income — that makes an economy flourish.
That’s a lot of money pouring into local businesses who can then hire more workers and employ more people and give them money to spend. It rolls on and builds from there.
In short, the economy isn’t fixed by wealth concentration.
It’s fixed by wealth distribution.
Raising the minimum wage and capping costs of living are the best tools we’ve got for fixing stagnating economies, assuming you aren’t willing to go all out on Universal Basic Income.
Letting a billionaire exploit more wage-slaves is not the answer. Widespread improvement is.
The existence of billionaires is a fundamental failure of society.
Nobody should be able to hoard so much wealth while homeless people exist. It goes without saying, but a decent human being would feel some measure of compassion for other people — at least enough to want to help.
But we live in a world and a culture where enormous wealth is seen as proof of success, and not exploitation and cruelty the way it ought to be viewed.
Nobody should want to be a billionaire. Hell, I don’t.
If I had that much money, I know what I’d do with it. I’d pay off mine and my spouse’s debt and square away enough so we’d never have to work again to live well. We’re frugal on the whole; we’re not private yacht people.
We’re nice home by the sea and a dependable car kind of people.
The rest of the money would go towards helping our families first, then local charities. I want to donate to shelters for the homeless and domestic violence survivors.
My spouse, as I mentioned, would want to start a debt buying company specifically so we could forgive it and free people from the cycle of debt and poverty.
If we had billions, we could do so much good. But because we feel that way, we’ll never have that kind of money. We just don’t have it in us to screw people over for a buck and hoard money for ourselves.
That’s why I have no respect for the people who actually do have that kind of money. What they choose to do with it reveals who they are, and I don’t like what I see.
That kind of wealth shouldn’t exist. And you shouldn’t want to be the kind of person who has it.
Solidarity wins.
One of your better pieces, Sam. It makes me want to make more money just to be able to help others. Irony? I dunno. lol
Very well said Sam. 👏🏼 👏🏼 👏🏼