All billionaires are policy failures

“All billionaires are policy failures”, Cory Doctorow.

I agree. To put billions in perspective, this is what it means.

Suppose you landed a job paying $1 per second, or $3,600 per hour. You are paid 24/7.

At this rate, it would take 11.6 days to earn $ 1 million. 

At the same job, it takes 11,600 days, or about 31.7 years, to accumulate $1 billion.

To acquire $1 trillion takes 31,700 years.

This type of accumulation means that an exponential amount of materials and labour needs to be extracted to accumulate this type of capital. A billionaire is literally an extraction machine – a giant vacuum machine. When we ask billionaires to pay their fair share in taxes, they seem to find this an unfair request. 

All billionaires are policy failures. Not just for their accumulation and extraction, which has an exponential negative consequence on all of life, but also because a society with billionaires will continually become a society with an ever-widening gap between the financially wealthy and the financially poor. 

A single billionaire is a FU to a viable future for Earth and all her creatures.

Photo Taken October 3rd  2023