In Defence of Billionaires

The populist vision of the wealthy being sons of Smaug, looting the populace to sit forever on a pile of gold is so utterly bizarre that I can only assume that such critics are utterly economically illiterate. Or communists.

Jeff Bezos, Sergey Bryn, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are totemic Bad Guys. (I wont include Musk. He relies on such high levels of debt and government contracts that his actual wealth can be seriously disputed). Because they have absurd levels of wealth. To give you a context – A million seconds is 11.5 days. A billion seconds is over 32 YEARS. That is the scale of money we are addressing, levels beyond our imagination.

Critics of these people will have you believe that they have generated such fortunes by impoverishing others. That if their wealth was spread around the population the world will be a better place for it. Somehow. None of this is how capitalism works, it’s not how business works, and it’s not how finance works.

None of these people have a billion dollars sitting in their bank accounts, ready to be wheeled out on pallets at their whim. Because contrary to what their critics assume, billionaires aren’t hoarders of money. They are CREATORS of wealth, And that wealth is not a dusty pile of gold, but rather is perpetually flowing around the financial markets, working to increase its value. It’s in your pension funds, your pay-checks, and your mortgage payments, it helps fund government itself.

Billionaires spend money. This is the niggling detail critics overlook. Bezos spent $500 of his millions on a rather nice super-yacht, the world’s largest schooner. I feel his pain; as a boat owner I am all too aware of the maintenance costs, the servicing, the mooring fees, the licences. Estimates have it that a super-yacht costs 10% of its costs to run – annually. That’s $50 million dollars a year that flows from Bezos to the crew, marine engineers, fuel companies, port authorities, food suppliers, flag makers, and a hundred other suppliers of goods and services. That money goes to other businesses – and into the pockets of the employees. The company that built that yacht is itself very valuable, and its employees rely on the billionaires existing to spend their money.

Microsoft and Google underpin our lives, like it or not. Their existence has created over 400,000 jobs. That’s direct employees. Employment that rests on the use of these companies products must reach the billions. All to enable people and companies to use their products to improve their outcomes. The value that Microsoft and Google has added to daily life is incalculable.

And yet there are seemingly endless critics of these wealth generators. Much seems to rest on an incoherent screech that it is inherently wrong for individuals to control such vast wealth. A more coherent and pertinent criticism rests on the amount of power that can flow from controlling so much wealth. Billionaires don’t merely focus on their core business, some become more politically and socially active. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are dispersing their absurd wealth to charitable causes, old school philanthropy. People complain about the causes so endowed, especially Gates’ interest in healthcare. They can’t win. If they sit on their wealth, they are wicked. If they spend it, they are evil.

This is just nonsensical. It signifies a disconnect between what billionaires do and what some believe they do. Not so far back in our economic development, it was accepted that the wealthy conduct good works. The likes of Carnegie built libraries and other causes for the greater social good. The landscape is littered with institutions commissioned by the wealthy. But this was when philanthropy filled in for the absence of government. We now have an expectation that government will fulfil all our needs, reducing the demand for private charity. We have a different outlook – We EXPECT government to do this. We DEMAND ever expanding government.

These shifts in our perception of government have warped our perceptions of billionaires and their social role. Wealthy individuals are seen as ‘bad’, and government is seen as ‘good’. The perilous basis of this belief in benign government contrasts with a belief in the malevolent view of the wealthy, and history tells us this faith is touching – but deeply corrosive on individual’s freedom.

We need to treasure our wealth creators. Not because they can add a little flamboyant colour to a dull world, but because they benefit all of us with the way they put their money to perpetual work. Oh, and everyone forgets this detail – the super rich pay for around 60% of the US federal budget. All the services and aid we demand from government is largely paid for by the rich. We may be better served if we cut out the government middleman in this wealth redistribution and give the billionaires the credit they have earned.

Ben Gunn is “one of Britain’s best known prisoners…he constantly questions authority and exposes the futility of the system” The Times. Pleading guilty to the murder of a friend when he was 14 years old, Ben has since renounced violence and consistently fought for the recognition of the inherent dignity of all human beings. As a result of speaking truth to power, Ben has served far longer than the recommended 10 years, leading Education Secretary Michael Gove to argue that Ben “has been punished excessively for a crime committed as a child”, and Lord Ramsbotham to state that “It is expensive and unnecessary to keep Ben Gunn in prison”.