On the Elimination of the Billionaire Class: A Modest Proposal.

already in the writing of Aristotle we
have the stated concern that a small number of people controlling more and more of the wealth that exists within that society is a problem for democracy is bad for democracy in fact in Aristotle who even get reflections on the extent to which this is a problem for aristocracy this is just a problem for oligarchy and monarchy it's a problem for any possible organization of society as he understood it and he tried to survey all the different ways to organize the society all the examples that were available to him in the history of the world as he knew it if we begin the discussion this way already were questioning the elimination of the billionaire class for reasons radically different from those that are familiar from socialists and communists I am NOT a socialist I am NOT a communist on the contrary I'm actually anti-communist however I share with Aristotle this fundamental concern about extreme wealth in our society I share an interest in eliminating billionaires from our society partly for the welfare of those billionaires themselves believe it or not partly in terms of questioning the future of wealth and what's good for democracy what's good for a society as a whole as as stated as something that can really be examined separately from the future of poverty this is a really rare example of a video in which I did more than one take I like to keep my videos unscripted and spontaneous and almost every single video on this channel is take one with no edits no modification it's uploaded on that basis but in this case I'm struggling to get across in a non-hostile non aggressive way the idea there is a compelling argument for the elimination of the billionaire class that is not based on socialism I'm not a socialist that is not based on communism I'm not a communist I'm an anti-communist and it is not even based on egalitarianism it's not even based on an argument for helping the poor on the contrary the concept of helping the poor can really be a strange distraction from what the real issues are when we're talking about the future of wealth in our society the function of wealth in our society and the reasons for why we should and must in my opinion eliminate the billionaire class do you think there's a qualitative difference between living in a society where one man owns all of the land and where 10,000 people owned small plots of land maybe you've never thought this through before but in France there's a famous wine growing region of Agriculture in Bordeaux when you go there what you find is that the land is not owned by one man the land is not owned by one corporation and it's not really organized you know in the way that having a central owner would would organize things use instead you see tiny little plots here and there each one owned by a different family and even though some of those families are millionaires some of them are billionaires the Rothschild family is their famous wealthy family in the history of Europe the Rothschild family is their farming wine but they have their own little tiny plot and then some distance away there's another little tiny plot and you know the two guys like their cousins or brothers different branches of the family and each family is focused on making the best use out of their own tiny plot of land right now would the quality of wine be improved if just one man owned all that land if just one corporation or just one family like the Rothschild family bought the whole wine growing region and consolidated control you know and reorganized maybe they could reorganize it to be more efficiently used have just one tractor instead of each family open it gets one tractor and this kind of thing there would be some efficiencies of scale you have to admit if just one family or just one corporation owned that whole farming district but something else would change and that's what I'm trying to draw your attention to in this argument this video because it's actually not that easy to perceive what the problem is with centralization of control centralization of ownership right and if you really understand the history of socialism mystery of communism the criticism I'm making here applies both to the billionaire class in a capital city and also to a communist dictatorship right because under communism that's exactly what would happen also you'd have one owner you'd have one corporation if you like reorganizing the land it would just be a landlord an owner a corporation that calls itself the people's wine-growing monopoly or the people's agricultural monopoly taking over that that reason and driving out destroying small platform farmers small small landowners okay it's natural for people to think about this problem in terms of distributing wealth to the poor but that's actually quite a dishonest unreasonable distraction from the real issue here that's why this is so so hard to articulate at my university in Canada probably at your university wherever you are in the United States Europe around the world the president of the university has paid a huge amount of money if you add up salaries and benefits the president the executive level the professors at the very top they are quite likely earning or university more than 1 million dollars per year maybe you go to one unusual university where it's only half a million dollars per year you would be surprised there is this cultural assumption that the president of the university the executive level people the university earn huge huge huge salaries ok if your argument is that by paying the president less you would help the poor then that argument is false right it's just not the case that if the president the university if his salary is reduced from 1 million dollars a year to a hundred thousand dollars a year it's not the case that nine hundred thousand dollars would then be given to starving people it's just not true now what would happen to the nine hundred thousand dollars well there is an achievable goal here of having a university where instead of one man earning a million dollars you have ten professors who are each earning a hundred thousand dollars that's a team that's possible right and maybe maybe those ten professors or maybe you have a hundred professors who do a greater extent share the executive responsibilities of the executive power reflecting their more even distribution of wealth none of this is about helping the poor all of these professors are wealthy people what we're talking about is the organization and function of the wealthy class we're talking with the future of the wealthy in society we're not talking about helping the poor but there are many other things fundamentally that change here right a word that probably didn't pop into your head before when we were talking about the wine growing region of Bordeaux having one owner versus many small boat owners word that probably didn't pop in your head was innovation innovation experimentation when you have many small land owners owning many small parcels of land and they all care about making the most out of that land making that most out of their opportunity okay there is more innovation there is more experimentation going on overall this skill as opposed to just one man just one corporation controlling it all and I think it is easy to imagine that if a university fires its president says forget it we're gonna fire you now we have 1 million dollars that we saved by firing you and we're not going to hire one person instead we're gonna hire 10 people pay them all hundred thousand dollars of course you would have more innovation like conceptually there's a certain amount of farmland this university has and they're giving it to more farmers right so the issue here really isn't the alleviation of the poor the issue here isn't the question of how charitable or society is toward the poor it's a question more to deal with qualitatively and quantitatively what use do we make of our wealth our wealth in the sense of our country as a whole or our society as a whole what is the social function of that wealth and the distribution of opportunity when more people have opportunity then there's more experimentation and more innovation going on visibly and invisibly it's not a simple question of oppression versus liberation and it's not a question of feeding starving people those are important questions too but those really have to be dealt with quite quite separately here when I was a boy maybe 11 years old maybe 13 years old thing was about 11 I met a man who owned more land within England than the total area of Israel all right so as a boy that was hard for me to get this one guy he owns land within England the size of Israel that was what he said and he had a whole story about you know his family they weren't aristocrats but they ended up buying land from this aristocrat who went bankrupt the interesting story how how he came into this and most people in England who lived on or around this land he owned they assumed that it was like a national park because the vast majority of the land he used was wasteland rocks and hills and shrubs and trees there's nothing to you farm there's nothing meet you so he happens to own the land but people go hiking on this land and they just imagine it's a national park right what would happen if we took his land and we divided it into 1,000 parcels and we gave that to 1,000 people let's say you and the audience let's say 1,000 people watch this video and each one of you is gonna get a small plot of land somewhere in England that could be used for some kind of farming purpose you could use it for an ecological purpose you could start running it like a park wildlife park or animal refuge you could do anything you want with it okay by distributing that opportunity so that more people have an opportunity you're gonna have more innovation you're gonna have more experimentation all right this one guy owns this land and he does nothing with it or I mean even if it's a corporation that farms wheat they just farm wheat and they farm wheat the same everywhere right that's how that corporation is anyway when 1000 people owned the land in separate small plots one of you is gonna say hey cranberries England has no history with farming cranberries that's something we do in Canada in Ontario you know what I think the climate here works I think the land I got works for cranberries I'm gonna try farming cranberries another one of you will have taken a vacation in South Korea and you notice you know what the Koreans they really have a culture of taking taking some of these root vegetables and and making them marketable making them delicious in a certain way you know currently here in England you know these types of root vegetables aren't worth any money maybe I can take those Korean techniques and I can try doing them here and I can try to make it profitable people are going to buy these vegetables if I prepare them in a more of a Korean way but that appeals to the local marketers like there is going to be experimentation and innovation and people don't think of Agriculture in terms of experimentation and innovation but this is this is really important and also that qualitative dimension I've already have already described or alluded to of just how much you care because this is your plot of land this is your opportunity right so you want to make the most of it you want to do the best you can there is a qualitative difference in our society as a whole between one billionaire who owns a thousand apartment buildings and is collecting rent from all of those apartment buildings every month and having a thousand different millionaires each one owns just one apartment building okay yes there's an element of innovation there's an element of different apartment buildings gonna try to be appealing or make make the best their situation the best they can but there's also just fundamentally this question of the ethic of care Donald Trump's father is a was a billionaire he's deceased now he owned a huge number of program buildings all over America he's collecting rents on all of them okay his attitude is gonna be completely different from someone who owns just one building this is my building I've got to care about how well it's maintained and how well it's run and how happy the residents are I've got it I've got to care about this in this intense and focused way all right we we have a better University when we have more professors who are earning $100,000 as opposed to the one president earning a million dollars we have a better society when we have a landlord class that's more divided up this way even if we're talking about a division between many millionaires we're not talking about helping the poor if you divide this up if again fundamentally it's just as much of a delusion to say we're gonna help the poor by paying the president the university less it's just as much of a delusion to say we're gonna help the poor by paying your landlord less if you live in an apartment building or a condominium tower that's owned by one of these massive corporations but we're gonna make our whole society better in this way that's difficult to trace that's difficult to pin down if instead we have a thousand millionaires controlling a thousand separate apartment buildings as opposed to one billionaire or one multibillion-dollar corporation that controls all of the apartment buildings this critique has existed since aristotle already in Aristotle's time we live in a society where there were two classes of men there were people who paid rent and there were people who collected the rent as long as the landlords are correct collecting rent even if the people paying rent aren't poor they may be middle-class that may be wealthy some of them though are gonna be the poor getting poorer as long as the landlord class is collecting rent than they are getting richer and richer mature until you get this kind of extreme inequality within the rich where you could in theory have one billionaire who owns all of the apartment buildings in your whole country who's collecting rent from everyone everyone else is paying rent and one person one person is profiting by right everyone buys cell phones cellular phones and there's one man who owns the factory that manufactures those cellular phones that one man the man who manufactures the iPhone and most of the other high-end expensive cellular phones the one man who owns that corporation he he stood for election here in Taiwan in the last election everyone knew this guy is just such a multi billionaire he just has so much money the question is will he buy the election he dropped out right right now in the United States you have a multi billionaire and the question is will he buy will he control the Democratic primary but there's a broader question right aristocratic societies exist by and for the aristocratic class all right societies dominated by billionaires exist by and for the billionaire class even if they don't get elected directly right in directly and ineluctably they have a weight and presence in this culture all right and in a country like Canada you really can't have a situation where there's one family that controls all of the pulp and paper industry and there's one family that controls you know all of the washing machines you know that used to be the case in Canada back before we had free trade and that comped where there's one family that got fantastically rich from agricultural equipment like tractors and so forth where you know it's not quite as extreme yet as one family that collects rent from everyone but it can eat especially in smaller economies it can become that unequal it can become that bad sector by sector when you look across the economy and you can't see the opportunity and innovation that snuffed out by this centralization of power and ownership by just one man or just one family or just one corporation you can't see that the farming regions of Canada could be as innovative as high quality as the farming regions of France where there are all these little small plot farmers who are passionately committed to making the most money you can't see that when one giant corporation like Cargill just owns this huge amount of land and farms it for one purpose and one uniform way paying people absolute minimum wage when you take away that element of engagement and responsibility and care and the potential for innovation you can't see what's missing right you can't see the absence you can't see the way in which our whole society is corrupted by the role that the billionaire class currently plays you can see the success of the Disney Corporation what's harder to see is how much better our whole culture would be how much more vibrant our whole democracy would be if it were divided up into say eight smaller corporations don't believe me think it through right now there is a Walt Disney theme park on the west coast California and there's a Walt Disney park on the east coast in Florida what if instead of striving for uniformity what if they were really innovating separately and each was competing against the other they divided their intellectual property there right what if those two were separate rival corporations making different kinds of films and different kinds of attractions at the theme parks wouldn't the world be a better place it would be and it would be a better place in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with helping the poor that's what's so interesting about this we're talking about reorganizing the wealthy in society reorganizing the wealth of society so that we can have a better democracy which is also Aristotle's concern right Aristotle was not a socialist he was not it he was not a communist right even though the type of qualitative changed the type of quantitative change here it wouldn't take money away from a billionaire and hand it to a starving homeless person that is in a fascinating way irrelevant to this question of why we should why we must eliminate the billionaire class