BILLIONAIRE ETHICS: AN OXYMORON?
THE MORAL BANKRUPTCY OF AMERICA'S NEW OLIGARCHY
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being a Permanent Renter in Someone Else's Monopoly Game
There's a delicious irony in the fact that the same billionaires who lecture us about "personal responsibility" and "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" have collectively mastered the art of avoiding over $150 billion in annual tax obligations while simultaneously dismantling the very public institutions that once made American social mobility possible. It's rather like being given life advice by someone who inherited a Ferrari dealership and insists their success came purely from "hard work" and "smart choices"—specifically, the smart choice of selecting wealthy parents.
Welcome to the Billionaire Ownership Society, where the only people who will actually own anything are the people who already own everything, and the rest of us get the privilege of renting our existence from them—our homes, our education, our healthcare, our infrastructure, even our data. It's a beautiful system, really, if you squint hard enough and ignore the screaming.
The Cost-Benefit Analysis of Morality (Spoiler: Morality Loses)
Let's talk about how billionaires make decisions, shall we? Imagine, if you will, a gleaming conference room on the 47th floor of some glass tower. A group of impeccably dressed executives gather around a mahogany table to perform what they call a "Cost-Benefit Analysis" on whether to, say, destroy public education in favor of privatized charter schools and vouchers.
Here's how that CBA works in practice:
Benefits Column:
- Potential profit margins: $$$
- Tax breaks for "educational philanthropy": $$$
- Elimination of teachers' unions: Priceless
- Ability to "counsel out" expensive special-needs students: $$$
- Personal satisfaction of reshaping society in one's own image: Immeasurable
Costs Column:
- The educational outcomes of poor children who can't afford private school: $0 (externality, not our problem)
- Social cohesion: $0 (intangible, can't monetize)
- Democratic citizenship: $0 (quaint concept, outdated)
- The constitutional principle of public education: $0 (legal fees are tax-deductible anyway)
Conclusion: BCR > 1.0. Project approved! Let's dismantle public education!
You see, when you're wealthy enough, you can simply redefine what counts as a "cost." That pesky problem of thousands of children being left behind in underfunded public schools? That's not a cost of your voucher program—that's a failure of government efficiency. The fact that your private equity firm bought a chain of nursing homes, slashed staff, and elderly residents suffered? Not a cost—that's just "market optimization." The reality that your company paid zero federal income tax while your workers qualified for food stamps? Not a moral failing—that's "fiduciary responsibility to shareholders."
It's a neat trick: externalize all the actual human suffering, internalize all the profit, and then lecture everyone else about "personal responsibility."
Buy, Borrow, Die: The Billionaire's Catechism
Let's examine the holy trinity of billionaire wealth preservation, a strategy so elegant in its amorality that it should be taught in philosophy classes as a case study in ethical nihilism:
Buy: Accumulate assets that appreciate in value—stocks, real estate, companies, politicians, media outlets, the usual.
Borrow: Instead of selling those assets (which would trigger capital gains taxes like some common millionaire), simply borrow against them at laughably low interest rates. Banks are delighted to lend you money at 2% when your net worth is $10 billion. That borrowed money? Not taxable as income. You can live like a modern pharaoh while technically having "no income" for tax purposes.
Die: Here's where it gets truly beautiful. When you finally shuffle off this mortal coil, your heirs inherit everything with a "stepped-up cost basis"—meaning all those capital gains that accumulated during your lifetime simply vanish for tax purposes. Decades of wealth accumulation, billions in appreciation, and the tax bill? Zero. Zilch. Nada.
It's the fiscal equivalent of a magic trick, except instead of pulling a rabbit out of a hat, you're pulling billions of dollars out of the public treasury, and instead of applause, you get a profile in Forbes celebrating your "business acumen."
Meanwhile, the schoolteacher paying 22% of her $50,000 salary in federal taxes gets to read about how Jeff Bezos paid zero federal income tax in 2007 and 2011, or how Elon Musk paid zero in 2018 despite being one of the wealthiest humans in history. I'm sure she finds that very motivating.
The Privatization of Everything: A Darwinian Fever Dream
The billionaire class has decided that the post-World War II social contract—you know, that quaint notion that a wealthy society should provide certain basic services to all its citizens—is terribly inefficient. Much better, they argue, to privatize everything and let the market sort it out.
Education? Privatize it. If your parents can't afford a decent school, well, perhaps you should have chosen wealthier parents. That's just basic planning.
Healthcare? Privatize it. If you can't afford insulin, have you considered not having diabetes? Personal responsibility!
Water? Privatize it. Nestle's former CEO literally argued that water isn't a human right. Apparently, the ability to not die of thirst should be subject to market forces and shareholder value.
Housing? Private equity firms like Blackstone have been buying up single-family homes by the tens of thousands, converting an entire generation from homeowners to permanent renters. Why let people build equity when they could pay rent forever?
Infrastructure? Privatize the roads, the bridges, the ports. Install toll booths on every surface. Why should transportation be a public good when it could be a profit center?
Prisons? Already done! Nothing says "justice system" like a corporation with a fiduciary duty to keep cells full.
The military? Private contractors now outnumber actual soldiers in many conflicts. Blackwater (or whatever they're calling themselves this week) has entered the chat.
This is the libertarian dream made manifest: a society where every single human interaction is mediated by a price signal, where every relationship is a transaction, where the very concept of "the commons" or "the public good" is dismissed as socialist nostalgia.
It's a Darwinian approach to civilization, except Darwin never suggested that the "fittest" should be determined by whether your great-grandfather owned an emerald mine. Natural selection doesn't typically involve trust funds.
The Monopoly Game (No, Really, Actual Monopolies)
Here's a fun exercise: try to go through a single day without enriching a billionaire's monopoly or oligopoly.
Morning: You wake up and check your phone (Apple or Google's Android—duopoly). You search for something (Google—monopoly). You scroll social media (Meta's Facebook/Instagram or Elon's X—oligopoly).
Commute: You order a ride (Uber/Lyft—duopoly). Or you fill up gas (ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP—oligopoly).
Work: You use Microsoft Office or Google Workspace (duopoly). Your company's infrastructure runs on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud (oligopoly).
Lunch: You order delivery (DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub—oligopoly owned by larger conglomerates).
Evening: You stream entertainment (Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, HBO Max—oligopoly). You shop online (Amazon—near-monopoly in many categories).
Healthcare: Your insurance? Probably UnitedHealth, Anthem, Aetna, Cigna, or Humana (oligopoly controlling 70%+ of the market).
At every turn, you're feeding the beast. And here's the kicker: these companies have become so powerful that they can effectively write their own regulations. They spend billions on lobbying to ensure that antitrust enforcement remains toothless, that tax loopholes remain open, that labor organizing remains difficult.
When you're wealthy enough to capture the regulatory apparatus, you don't have to worry about pesky things like "competition" or "market forces." You just buy the referees.
The Tax Avoidance Hall of Fame
Let's celebrate some of the creative genius that goes into ensuring billionaires contribute as little as possible to the society that enabled their wealth:
Peter Thiel's Roth IRA: Somehow managed to stuff $5 billion into a Roth IRA that's supposed to be for middle-class retirement savings. The gains? Completely tax-free. It's like showing up to a potluck with a thimble of potato salad and leaving with a whole turkey.
Jeff Yass's Options Alchemy: Used complex financial instruments to convert short-term trading income (taxed at 37%) into long-term capital gains (taxed at 20%), saving over $1 billion in six years. It's not tax evasion—it's "tax optimization." Completely different.
Sports Team Ownership: Buy a team that appreciates in value by hundreds of millions, but claim massive "depreciation" deductions on the players' contracts. Pay a lower tax rate than the hot dog vendor in your stadium. Chef's kiss.
Real Estate and Oil Breaks: Structure your holdings correctly, and you can eliminate your income tax entirely while your net worth grows by billions. Stephen Ross, real estate mogul, managed this feat beautifully.
The Private Jet Loophole: Place your $50 million private jet in a corporate structure, and suddenly your vacation to Aspen is a "business expense." The maintenance, the fuel, the crew—all deductible. Meanwhile, the teacher can't deduct the $300 she spent on classroom supplies. Priorities!
Charitable Foundations: Donate appreciated stock to your private foundation, get a tax deduction for the full market value, avoid capital gains tax, and then slowly distribute the money to causes you control while paying your family members to run the foundation. It's philanthropy as tax shelter and dynastic power preservation. How noble!
The Libertarian Delusion
The ideological justification for all of this is a particularly virulent strain of libertarianism that would make even Ayn Rand blush (and she was already pretty shameless).
The argument goes something like this:
- Taxation is theft
- Government is inherently inefficient
- The free market solves all problems
- Any regulation is tyranny
- If you're poor, it's because you made bad choices
- If I'm rich, it's because I'm a genius
- Society doesn't exist; there are only individuals
- The best society is one where everyone pursues self-interest
- Somehow, magically, this creates optimal outcomes for everyone
It's a beautiful theory. It has one tiny flaw: it's completely detached from reality, history, human psychology, and basic moral reasoning.
Let's address these points:
Taxation is theft? No, taxation is the price of civilization. You know what's actually theft? Paying workers so little they qualify for government assistance while you buy your fourth yacht. That's wage theft subsidized by taxpayers.
Government is inefficient? Medicare has administrative costs of about 2%. Private insurance? Try 12-18%. The "inefficient" government program is six times more efficient. But sure, let's privatize everything.
Free markets solve everything? Tell that to the residents of Flint, Michigan, still dealing with lead-poisoned water years after a cost-cutting privatization scheme. Tell that to anyone who's tried to negotiate with their health insurance company while having a heart attack. Markets are tools, not gods.
Regulation is tyranny? You know what's tyranny? Company towns where workers were paid in scrip only usable at the company store. Child labor in coal mines. Asbestos insulation. Lead paint. Rivers catching fire from pollution. We regulated those things because the "free market" was perfectly happy to kill people for profit.
Poor people made bad choices? The largest predictor of your adult income is your parents' income. Social mobility in the United States has been declining for decades. But sure, it's all about "choices."
Rich people are geniuses? Some are brilliant. Many inherited wealth. Some got lucky. Some are genuinely talented but benefited from enormous structural advantages. And some—let's be honest—are mediocrities who happened to be in the right place at the right time. Wealth does not equal merit.
Society doesn't exist? Margaret Thatcher said this, and it remains one of the most sociopathic statements in modern political history. Of course society exists. We're social animals. Our greatest achievements—science, art, democracy, human rights—are collective endeavors. This hyper-individualism is a fiction designed to justify selfishness.
Self-interest creates optimal outcomes? Sometimes. In limited contexts. With proper regulation. And a functioning social safety net. And antitrust enforcement. And labor protections. And environmental regulations. Adam Smith himself warned about the dangers of monopolies and the need for public education. The libertarians who worship him have apparently never read past page one of The Wealth of Nations.
The Education Apocalypse
Let's return to where we started: the billionaire assault on public education.
Why do they hate public schools so much? Let me count the ways:
1. Teachers' Unions: One of the last remaining sources of organized labor power in America. Can't have workers organizing—that's inefficient!
2. Ideological Control: Public schools teach things like "evolution" and "climate science" and "civil rights history." Much better to have private schools where you can teach whatever version of reality you prefer.
3. Profit Opportunity: Education is a multi-hundred-billion-dollar sector. Why should that money go to teachers and students when it could go to shareholders?
4. Social Sorting: Public schools have to accept everyone—rich, poor, disabled, immigrant, everyone. Private schools can "counsel out" the expensive students. It's eugenics with better PR.
5. Democratic Citizenship: Public schools, at their best, teach kids to be citizens of a democracy, to think critically, to understand their rights. Private schools teach kids to be consumers in a marketplace. Guess which one billionaires prefer?
The voucher scheme is particularly insidious. Here's how it works:
- Give families a $7,000 voucher to leave public schools
- The public school loses $7,000 in funding
- But the school still has the same building to heat, the same buses to run, the same fixed costs
- So the remaining students have fewer resources
- The school's performance declines
- Reformers point to the "failing" school as evidence that public education doesn't work
- Rinse and repeat until public education is gutted
Meanwhile, the private schools that accept vouchers:
- Can reject students with disabilities (too expensive)
- Can reject English language learners (too expensive)
- Can reject students with behavioral issues (too disruptive)
- Can teach creationism as science
- Can discriminate based on religion
- Have no accountability for student outcomes
- Can close mid-year if they're not profitable, leaving families scrambling
It's a system designed to benefit those who need help least and abandon those who need help most. And it's all justified with the language of "choice" and "freedom."
You know what would actually improve education? Paying teachers more. Reducing class sizes. Fixing crumbling infrastructure. Providing universal pre-K. Ensuring every child has healthcare and food security. Investing in counselors and social workers.
But that would require taxes. And we can't have that.
The Democracy Problem
Here's the uncomfortable truth that should keep us all awake at night: democracy and oligarchy cannot coexist indefinitely.
When a tiny handful of individuals control more wealth than the bottom half of the entire population, they don't just have economic power—they have political power. They can:
- Fund political campaigns and expect favorable policies in return
- Hire armies of lobbyists to write legislation
- Buy media outlets to shape public opinion
- Fund think tanks to produce "research" supporting their interests
- Threaten to move operations if they don't get tax breaks
- Sue governments into submission with unlimited legal resources
- Create astroturf "grassroots" movements
- Literally buy social media platforms to control the discourse (looking at you, Elon)
This isn't democracy. This is oligarchy with a democratic facade.
The ancient Greeks understood this. They knew that extreme wealth inequality was incompatible with democracy. That's why they had mechanisms like ostracism and liturgies—ways to prevent any individual from accumulating too much power.
The American founders understood this too. They were worried about aristocracy and concentrated wealth. That's why we had estate taxes, antitrust laws, progressive income taxes, and strong labor protections—mechanisms to prevent the emergence of a permanent oligarchy.
Those mechanisms have been systematically dismantled over the past 40 years. The result? We now have wealth inequality levels not seen since the Gilded Age. Three Americans have more wealth than the bottom 50% combined. The Walton family (Walmart heirs) has more wealth than 40% of Americans combined.
This is not sustainable. History is quite clear on this point: societies with extreme inequality either reform or collapse. There is no third option.
The Cost-Benefit Analysis of Civilization
Let's do our own CBA, shall we? Let's weigh the costs and benefits of continuing down this path versus choosing a different direction.
Current Path: Continued Oligarchic Consolidation
Benefits:
- A few thousand people get to live like modern pharaohs
- Innovation in luxury goods (space tourism, mega-yachts, private islands)
- Efficient extraction of wealth from labor and public resources
- Philosophical satisfaction for libertarians
Costs:
- Collapse of social mobility
- Destruction of public goods
- Erosion of democratic institutions
- Increased social instability and political extremism
- Environmental catastrophe (because externalities don't matter in the quarterly earnings report)
- Loss of human potential (how many Einsteins are driving for Uber?)
- Eventual societal collapse (see: every previous oligarchy in history)
Alternative Path: Democratic Reform
Benefits:
- Shared prosperity
- Investment in public goods (education, healthcare, infrastructure)
- Increased social mobility
- Stronger democracy
- Better health and happiness outcomes (yes, there's data on this)
- Sustainable environmental practices
- Unleashing human potential across the entire population
- Civilization that doesn't collapse
Costs:
- Billionaires become slightly less wealthy (the horror!)
- Some inefficiency in public programs (still more efficient than private monopolies)
- Rich people have to pay taxes (like they did during the most prosperous period in American history)
Hmm. Tough call. Really hard to decide here.
What Is To Be Done?
The situation is dire, but not hopeless. History shows that oligarchies can be reformed when enough people demand it. The Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement—these were all successful challenges to concentrated power.
Here's what we need:
1. Tax Reform:
- Close the "buy, borrow, die" loophole by taxing loans secured by assets over a certain threshold
- Implement a wealth tax on assets over $50 million
- Raise capital gains taxes to match income tax rates
- Eliminate the stepped-up basis at death
- Actually fund the IRS so they can audit the wealthy (every $1 spent on IRS enforcement returns $12 in revenue from wealthy tax cheats)
2. Antitrust Enforcement:
- Break up monopolies and oligopolies
- Block anti-competitive mergers
- Regulate platform monopolies as public utilities
- Restore the original intent of antitrust law: preventing concentrated power, not just "consumer welfare"
3. Labor Rights:
- Strengthen unions and collective bargaining
- Raise the minimum wage to a living wage
- Enforce wage theft laws (wage theft exceeds all other property theft combined)
- Mandate worker representation on corporate boards
4. Public Investment:
- Universal healthcare (every other developed nation does this; we can too)
- Free public college (we had this in many states until the 1970s)
- Universal pre-K
- Massive infrastructure investment
- Green energy transition (which would create millions of jobs)
5. Democratic Reform:
- Overturn Citizens United
- Public financing of elections
- Strict lobbying regulations
- Restore the Voting Rights Act
- End gerrymandering
- Make voting easier, not harder
6. Education:
- Massively increase funding for public schools
- Pay teachers like the professionals they are
- Reduce class sizes
- Fix crumbling infrastructure
- Provide universal school meals
- Stop the privatization schemes
None of this is radical. Most of it existed in America within living memory. We had top marginal tax rates of 91% in the 1950s—a period of enormous economic growth and prosperity. We had strong unions and robust antitrust enforcement. We invested in public goods.
Then we decided to try the libertarian experiment. We cut taxes on the wealthy, gutted regulations, crushed unions, and privatized everything we could.
The results are in: it doesn't work. It produces oligarchy, inequality, instability, and decline.
Conclusion: The Moral Bankruptcy of Billionaire Ethics
So, is "billionaire ethics" an oxymoron?
Not necessarily. There are some billionaires who genuinely try to use their wealth responsibly, who advocate for higher taxes on themselves, who invest in public goods rather than just private luxuries.
But the system that creates and sustains billionaires—the system that allows individuals to accumulate wealth equivalent to the GDP of small nations while others work full-time and still need food stamps—that system is fundamentally unethical.
It's unethical because it treats human beings as commodities rather than as ends in themselves.
It's unethical because it allows vast suffering to exist alongside vast wealth.
It's unethical because it concentrates power in ways that undermine democracy.
It's unethical because it treats the commons—our shared resources, our public institutions, our environment—as opportunities for private extraction rather than collective stewardship.
It's unethical because it operates on a cost-benefit analysis that assigns zero value to human dignity, social cohesion, democratic citizenship, and the basic moral principle that we have obligations to one another.
The billionaire oligarchy is moving to destroy public education not because it's inefficient, but because educated citizens are harder to exploit. They're privatizing public goods not because markets work better, but because monopolies are profitable. They're avoiding taxes not because taxation is theft, but because they can.
And they're wrapping it all in the language of "freedom" and "choice" and "efficiency"—as if the freedom to be exploited is real freedom, as if the choice between bad options is real choice, as if efficiency in extracting wealth is the only kind of efficiency that matters.
Our democracy cannot survive much more of this. The libertarian experiment has failed. The data is in. The results are clear.
It's time to remember that we are not just individuals in a marketplace. We are citizens in a democracy. We are members of a society. We have obligations to one another. We have a commons to protect. We have a civilization to maintain.
And that civilization cannot be built on the principle that if you can afford a service you get it, but if you can't afford it you don't need it.
That's not civilization. That's barbarism with better marketing.
We can do better. We have done better. And we must do better again.
Because the alternative—a society of billionaire owners and everyone else as permanent renters, where every human need is a profit opportunity and every public good is privatized—that's not a society worth having.
It's a dystopia. And we're living in it.
The question is: what are we going to do about it?
"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." — Franklin D. Roosevelt
"There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for." — Elizabeth Warren
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." — Louis Brandeis
The billionaires have made their choice. Now we must make ours.
