Is $1 Billion Too Much Money for Any One Person to Have? (Published 2019) (2024)

In 2018, there were 585 billionaires in America, with a combined wealth of over $2.8 trillion. The wealthiest, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has a net worth of $160 billion.

The world’s eight richest individuals have as much wealth as the bottom half in the world, and the three richest Americans hold more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the United States.

Should there be a limit to how much wealth a person has? If so, how much is too much?

In “Abolish Billionaires,” Farhad Manjoo writes:

Last fall, Tom Scocca, editor of the essential blog Hmm Daily, wrote a tiny, searing post that has been rattling around my head ever since.

“Some ideas about how to make the world better require careful, nuanced thinking about how best to balance competing interests,” he began. “Others don’t: Billionaires are bad. We should presumptively get rid of billionaires. All of them.”

Mr. Scocca — a longtime writer at Gawker until that site was muffled by a billionaire — offered a straightforward argument for kneecapping the wealthiest among us. A billion dollars is wildly more than anyone needs, even accounting for life’s most excessive lavishes. It’s far more than anyone might reasonably claim to deserve, however much he believes he has contributed to society.

At some level of extreme wealth, money inevitably corrupts. On the left and the right, it buys political power, it silences dissent, it serves primarily to perpetuate ever-greater wealth, often unrelated to any reciprocal social good. For Mr. Scocca, that level is self-evidently somewhere around one billion dollars; beyond that, you’re irredeemable.

He continues by discussing the idea of abolishing billionaires:

But it is an illustration of the political precariousness of billionaires that the idea has since become something like mainline thought on the progressive left. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are floating new taxes aimed at the superrich, including special rates for billionaires. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who also favors higher taxes on the wealthy, has been making a moral case against the existence of billionaires. Dan Riffle, her policy adviser, recently changed his Twitter name to “Every Billionaire Is a Policy Failure.” Last week, HuffPost asked, “Should Billionaires Even Exist?”

I suspect the question is getting so much attention because the answer is obvious: Nope. Billionaires should not exist — at least not in their present numbers, with their current globe-swallowing power, garnering this level of adulation, while the rest of the economy scrapes by.