A Plague of Billionaires?
20th April 2022
The United States is awash in crises. The crime rate is surging; inflation continues to rise; COVID-19 is still not tamed; curricular reform is a contentious issue at all levels of education; global warming continues to be the source of much anxiety; the antitrust laws are under strong attack; social media continues to be a flashpoint. But for the readers of the New York Times Magazine, on April 10, 2022—devoted largely to The Money Issue—attacking the proliferation of new billionaires, who now total 735 (or is it 927?) has become the centerpiece of their campaign to reduce income and wealth inequality.
The alarm bells of this trend have been rung by Willy Staley, one of its staff writers, whose lead delivers this supposed knockout punch: “Their numbers are out of control—and the rest of us are subject to their whims.” This makes great copy, but horrific economics. Just why is the increased number of billionaires a bad thing? Theirs is not a coming crime wave in which each of us are put at risk for the loss of our lives or property by a new band of predators. Indeed, the exact opposite is true. Although none of the Times’s writers cares to mention the point, each of these billionaires (or their direct ancestors) created the wealth by selling goods and services to people, which at a minimum had a total value far greater to those people than the fraction of the gain that the billionaires were able to garner for themselves.