Four Reasons Why We Should Not Have Billionaires

Jonathan Church

November 20, 2025

In a recent interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, the Mayor-Elect of New York City Zohran Mamdani sparked a predictable backlash when he gently suggested, “I don’t think that we should have billionaires.” The outrage from billionaires and their apologists was swift and unsurprising. The American Enterprise Institute invoked the age-old supply-side shibboleth that “billionaires make the rest of us richer, not poorer” to insist that we “should want more billionaires, not fewer—and certainly not none.” The editorial board of the right-wing tabloid New York Post claimed that Mamdani wants “to make us all live in equal…misery.” And of course, the billionaires themselves started having temper tantrums, lashing out against an incipient threat to their unchecked wealth and power.    

The rejoinder of billionaires and their apologists is always some cliché variation on their warped belief that rich people earned their wealth all on their own, and we are all better off because of it—a refrain so robotic and recurrent that it seems forever etched into the ideological DNA of right-wing zealots. For example, when the Trump toady Scott Bessent was asked by Senator Bernie Sanders, in a Senate Finance Committee hearing as the nominee for United States Treasury Secretary, about whether “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that really threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” Bessent deflected by saying, in the smug manner of someone who has been asked if the sun rises in the East, that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg all made their billions themselves.

In other words, it is sacrilegious to doubt whether, in fact, billionaires deserve their billions. The prima facie conviction is that billionaires earned their loot as genius entrepreneurs, star athletes, astute business executives, celebrity performers, and other creative fountainheads without whom human civilization as we have come to know it supposedly would not exist. We are fantastically naive if we fail to appreciate that “Steve Jobs got billions of dollars and consumers got billions of iPhones” or that “Bezos brought eCommerce to the masses and pioneered the data storage business” while “Musk has done more for electric vehicles than all the other car companies combined.” We are stupendously obtuse if we fail to respect the economics of rent-seeking, and maddeningly ungrateful if we ask “[w]hy [they] should … get 1,000,000x more compensation than the engineers and designers who built the product under [their] direction[?]”

But there is always more to reality than meets the eye, especially when we look “under the hood” (a tiresome cliché that the savvy savants of Wall Street love to use when doing their bits on Bloomberg and CNBC) of our great bustling dystopia of “meritocratic” inequality.  We might point out that the story of how Elon Musk made his fortune is a bit more of a sordid tale than the myth lets on, and certainly involves a lot of “corporate socialism” in the form of at least $38 billion of government funding, some of which helped turn the tide in favor of Tesla when it was on the brink. We might point out that Steve Jobs was ousted during his first stint at Apple and spent a lot of time wallowing in the exodus of failure (at least by his standards, we can suppose), and only earned his first cool billion off the commercial success of the movie Toy Story while he was heading a company that invested in first-rate computer graphics and animation. As much as we all love Amazon (I do!) and can acknowledge Bezos’s entrepreneurial vision and leadership in harvesting the potential of online commerce, common sense alone tells us that he could not single-handedly build the cloud himself, never mind everything else Amazon does. As for Mark Zuckerberg, let’s just say that it is interesting that a book about his rise to fame and fortune, and contentious litigation with the Winklevoss twins, is entitled The Accidental Billionaires.

Once our idols of rapacious capitalism grab their first billion (or hundreds of millions), it should not take a finance degree to appreciate the wonders of compounding that come with a billion dollars in your bank account. We can also understand how much easier it is to recruit talent and take risks when you have a stash of a billion dollars at your back. To be sure, we should not ignore or deny the talents of people who make it big and we should not underestimate the extent to which a company like Amazon has improved our standard of living. We should also guard against the zealots of ressentiment who insist on the absolute equality of outcomes because they envy the success of others.

But the question remains, does that mean we should endure billionaires who have command over such a wealth of resources? No, and there are four good reasons why society is better off by redistributing their wealth—in accord with smart, well-designed policies that invest in public infrastructure, provide sizable social safety nets, ensure quality universal health care, and generally ensure the social and economic conditions that enable all people, not just rich people, to flourish. Like, for example, in democratic economies that we find in countries like Denmark and Sweden.

1. Meritocracy Is a Sham

   
   

The outsized, even flamboyant, social status of billionaires in our society effectively exalts, and thus legitimizes and sustains, the corrosive myth of meritocracy. Admittedly, it probably seems preposterous or foolhardy to the uninitiated reader to regard meritocracy—a society in which we are purportedly rewarded in proportion to our merit—as a pejorative. Is it not a welcome relief in the long arc of history, which supposedly bends toward justice, that meritocratic society has gradually supplanted aristocratic hierarchies of the past? In theory, perhaps. In practice, however, meritocratic society has proved to be just as insidiously hierarchical as aristocratic societies of the past. In fact, meritocracy may be more poisonous to civic relations than aristocracy.

The meritocratic ideal that has shaped society at least since Michael Young’s The Rise of Meritocracy is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Meritocratic society harbors a mindset in which we conceive of our fellow citizens as deserving of dignity and respect primarily, if not exclusively, to the extent that they have acquired wealth and influence within society, on the faith that they are entitled to such dignity and respect on the basis of their own merit. The result is a body politic in which we designate people as winners and losers, and the “losers” are disempowered not by virtue of birth or tradition but by “virtue” of their own warranted failures. It is as if they deserve their diminished status solely because they lost in the hunger games of rapacious capitalism. 

This way of life engenders a populist politics of ressentiment, documented in great detail in such books as The Tyranny of Merit and The Meritocracy Trap, among working-class people who feel disenfranchised in a system in which the leverage gained from one’s ready access to social and financial capital is often far more critical to material advancement than the fruits of earning an honest living. Moreover, when the metric of success and failure is so closely tethered to the relentless churn of profit maximization and capital accumulation, the devotion to shareholder value (and fictitious capital in general) results in a “sharp focus on profits and cutting expenses” that makes it hardly surprising, for example, that Uber vastly underreported reports of sexual assault and sexual misconduct from 2017 to 2022. After all, Uber’s own brainstorming document on safety standards is clear: “Our purpose/goal is not to be the police.” It “is to protect the company and set the tolerable risk level for our operations.” Uber thus becomes another example of technological prowess that rewards the rich and leaves the rest of us—drivers, passengers, and victims of sexual assault—feeling that we only matter as targets for the billionaire techies to pickpocket while they tell us that all is the for the best in the best of all possible (meritocratic) worlds.

Meritocracy also thrusts the profoundly unhealthy anxieties of overachievement into overdrive. As I wrote in this essay, “Nvidia employees and Wall Street analysts sacrifice their mental and physical health on the altar of long hours, sleepless nights, tight deadlines, and toxic workplace relations with people who are paid like kings to be ferocious competitors rather than cooperative colleagues.” They put on the “golden handcuffs” and become “practically ill-equipped to walk away from the earnings that they have no time to enjoy, while pushing the frontiers of fetishized technological progress that further entrenches a culture of burnout.” But is this not a miserable work-life imbalance? Is this not the impoverished existence of one who is enslaved to the Faustian bargain between obscene wealth and late-night calls from a taskmaster boss as his aspirations for autonomy, flourishing, and civic worth that he nourished in the salad days of his youth wither away?

To be clear, the point is not that someone who is good at his job should not be promoted, well paid, or otherwise rewarded. It is not that students who perform well and have unique talents should not be admitted to elite schools. And so on. The challenge is to cease worshiping a myth of superordinate social status that requires all-consuming sacrifices of time and energy in a relentless corporate pressure cooker that billionaires impose for their own enrichment, while we all lose sight of alternative possibilities—e.g., earning an honest living in an honorable trade while having ample time for family and community engagement, being employed in the study of beauty if we have aesthetic sensibilities, or being active in the cultivation of virtue as we pursue, like the ancient Greeks, a “good life” and a “great soul”—not to the exclusion of material ends, but which is not wholly dependent on them. 

The challenge is not to cease our admiration for achievement, but to stop thinking that “success”, however defined, is the only worthwhile source of dignity, all the while ignoring the role that luck plays in our lives. Unfortunately, it seems a cardinal rule of meritocratic society that once the good luck of birth, environment, and other factors have paved a path for the winners, those winners act like they have been anointed by the universe to tell the rest of us how we should live our lives, making little or no allowance for the variety of ways in which each of us may find it optimal to live and work.

2. Luck Is (Almost) Everything

   
   

As noted, one source of stubborn resistance to the idea that the state should seize and redistribute the wealth of billionaires is that such an action amounts to a brazen theft of property that billionaires earned by the sweat of their brow. The inevitable result apparently would be a brain drain, as talented people withdraw from society in a protest akin to what we observe in Galt’s Gulch of Ayn Rand’s dystopian, uber-libertarian novel Atlas Shrugged. Why invest time and energy in creative enterprise if the fruits of one’s investment will be confiscated by the state? We would only be repeating the mistakes of rogue regimes that impoverished their societies by nationalizing industries. 

This depiction, however, has always been a caricature of reality. Prosperity, or lack thereof, depends a lot more on luck than we are inclined to believe. It was a loan by the United States Department of Energy (and some dissembling by Elon Musk) that proved critical for the survival of Tesla and, thus, a great deal of Musk’s wealth, and that is to say nothing of the government contracts that fund SpaceX (and its largely untaxed status) and its own enormous contribution to Musk’s wealth. Musk loves to boast about being a hardcore workaholic to emphasize his entrepreneurial drive, but sleeping on the factory floor is a performative gesture that ignores how lucky he is that he escaped detection as an undocumented immigrant due to the political environment in the 1990s when he was starting out. As such, he was allowed to live in a society with a mature government that protects property rights, enforces the rule of law, and supports the kind of public infrastructure that fosters future prosperity—for example, the Internet, upon which Musk initially built his fortune. It also ignores his fortunate upbringing in a wealthy South African family, not to mention all the people whom he was lucky enough to come across in his adventures and whose assistance undoubtedly contributed to his success along the way. 

In principle, we need only imagine for ourselves the totality of possible contingencies, counterfactuals, and other considerations that factor into any assessment of our own successes and failures in life. Luck, however, is about much more than the contingencies and counterfactuals of our own individual fates. This is not the place to expand at length on all that the concept of luck entails, but we can get the basic idea of luck’s significance by keeping in mind that, for all the talk by billionaire Peter Thiel about how entrepreneurial success is all about finding unique and contrarian “truths,” it remains the case that businesses are far more likely to fail than succeed, and usually for reasons beyond our control. As for those businesses that succeed, they also succeed for many reasons beyond our control. Illusion of control and survivorship bias are two cognitive errors that frequently obscure our understanding of the role of luck in our life outcomes.

The point is not to deny that personal ability and initiative matter. The point instead is to recognize that one’s ability and initiative are only two among a totality of circumstantial contributions to the successes and failures in one’s life, even our beliefs about what constitutes “success.” Moreover, our very abilities—which are undoubtedly still worthy of recognition, respect, and reward—depend on such obvious facts as the luck of birth and the influences of our early childhood environment. In that crucial respect, meritocracy is not very different from aristocracy.

3. Taxation and Redistribution Are Consistent with Economic Efficiency

   
   

Given the role that luck plays in our lives, we can appreciate the extent to which health emergencies, job insecurity, child care, and unexpected expenses due to car repairs, credit downgrades, grocery inflation, power outages, weather extremities, plumbing fixes, and so on affect the ability of people to work, save, invest, and pursue new opportunities free of the anxieties of not being able to pay the bills. We can appreciate the deep anxieties of young Americans who lose health care coverage when they reach the age of 26. We can understand the frustrations of middle-class Americans who cannot afford the homes that billionaire hedge funds buy when they exploit the undersupply and excess demand for housing to make a killing while hiring risk management experts who are paid top dollar to turn luck in the favor of their billionaire clients until the system crashes and then, if they are (most likely) lucky, government comes to the rescue. 

We can also fathom why all the talk about how America’s “dynamic” economy is the envy of the world is small consolation to the millions of baristas, car mechanics, truck drivers, desk clerks, construction workers, waitresses, bartenders, ranchers, letter carriers, housepainters, electricians, barbers, and other tradespeople who enable the economy to function everyday while they labor under the near certainty that luck usually will not go their way when push comes to shove in a society where deep inequality is endemic. Especially since they cannot afford the lawyers, lobbyists, and other means of leverage that corporate power employs to defend itself against any challenge to its privilege. 

It is all the more infuriating because redistribution of wealth and income can profoundly improve the lives of millions without disrupting markets and the efficiency of economic activity. In principle, the second welfare theorem of economics provides a conceptual framework for understanding why redistribution does not have to sabotage the efficiency of competitive markets. In practice, as the book Nordic Socialism explains, Nordic countries thrive as social democracies in which economic growth, markets, and property rights co-exist with such “socialist” policies and priorities as high broad-based taxation, producer and consumer cooperatives, community owned waterworks, and democratically managed public sectors in health care, education, and childcare. 

Nordic countries also consistently score among the happiest countries in the world, measured in terms of civic trust, institutional integrity, welfare state generosity, lower levels of income inequality, and personal autonomy. One of the main indications is that people in Nordic countries possess a “high sense of autonomy and freedom” that “can be attributed to relatively high material prosperity combined with well-functioning democracy and liberal values that prevail in the Nordic countries.”

4. Billionaires Are Bad for Democracy 

   
   

The experience of Nordic countries is a direct rebuttal to billionaire Peter Thiel’s claim that “freedom and democracy are no longer compatible.” Thiel is a supporter of Curtis Yarvin, whose vacuous writings argue that American democracy should be replaced by a monarchy in the form of a strong-willed corporate CEO. Thiel’s support for Yarvin’s neo-reactionary Dark Enlightenment musings reflects his indefatigable commitment to corporate power and the entrepreneurial pursuit of monopolization.

It does not take much research to learn that a deeply inegalitarian commitment to oligarchy lies at the root of Thiel’s (and Yarvin’s) attacks on democracy. Thiel, after all, is known in part for his ownership stake in Palantir, a data-intelligence firm that President Trump selected to assist federal government agencies and departments in the effort to share personal data on Americans for surveillance purposes in adherence to an executive order signed earlier this year. Palantir is named after crystal balls named palantiri in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. These crystal balls were used by the elves to see into the past and present. The reference to elves takes on some importance when we consider a Substack post by Curtis Yarvin advocating for a plot of “dark elves” within the elf population who, like the libertarian extremists with whom he and Thiel consort, are advised to assume a low profile while plotting to take power for the benefit of themselves and the hobbits they will rule. It is a vision they have now realized with one of their own, JD Vance, serving as vice president under the oligarchic billionaire authoritarian who now sits in the Oval Office.

This is just one example, but in our society, the examples are endless. After all, billionaires are making out like bandits under the Trump administration’s recently enacted and “epically regressive” One Big Beautiful Bill. Peter Thiel’s wealth has increased at least $9 billion this year as a result of Palantir’s selection by the Trump administration to collect data on American citizens, despite Thiel’s apparent belief that “it matters little who’s in power.” And of course, “[t]his comes as Palantir admits its goal is to cut jobs—but grow revenue by 10x thanks to AI.” It becomes increasingly clear that, for Thiel, it is his own freedom to do whatever he wants, not the freedom of the rest of us to flourish, that Thiel considers to be incompatible with democracy. 

America originated as a democracy, and has managed to remain a democracy for over 200 years. At its heart, democracy is about creating a society in which everyone feels they have a stake and a voice. In today’s society, however, it is increasingly the case that politicians only make time for the demands of billionaires. It is the billionaires who want to dictate the conditions and values that underlie the way we live. It should come as no surprise that those conditions and values are consistent with billionaires extracting more money from the rest of us while eradicating our personal autonomy, as when Elon Musk sent a midnight email to Twitter employees demanding that any employees who chose to the remain at the company must commit themselves to working “long hours at high intensity.” This was after he bought the company for $44 billion (because, after all, he is rich enough to do so on the basis of wealth he gained largely by luck) and cut half the workforce. It was not in jest that Benjamin Franklin asserted that America is a republic if we can keep it. Whether it is Peter Thiel funding litigation to bankrupt a news site, or Elon Musk killing innocent children in the Sudan by shutting down USAID, the greatest threat to democracy comes from billionaires and their utter disregard, even contempt, for the rest of us.  

Conclusion

When Mitt Romney attacked Barack Obama during the 2012 presidential campaign for Obama’s remark that “[i]f you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that,” he deliberately obscured the point Obama was trying to make in a campaign speech that “[s]omebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.” For example, “[i]f you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help,” like “a great teacher somewhere in your life.” Or if you are Jeff Bezos building a fleet of Amazon delivery trucks, “[s]omebody invested in roads and bridges” that enable those trucks to deliver on their mission. “The point is,” Obama concluded, “is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.” No one does it alone. We get help from the moment we are born.

Democracy is at the heart of “this unbelievable American system” that Obama praised. It has always been an ongoing experiment. But it is now fundamentally threatened by the burdens of meritocracy, deepening inequality, and the rise of a billionaire oligarchy which insidiously obscures not only the role of luck in their “successes” and our “failures,” but also their utter disregard for the well-being of the baristas, car mechanics, truck drivers, desk clerks, construction workers, waitresses, bartenders, ranchers, letter carriers, housepainters, electricians, barbers, and all other tradespeople who enable the economy to function every day. The billionaires have made it clear they do not care about the rest of us. We should respond in solidarity that we do not need, or want, the billionaires.