Some Back-of-the-envelope Calculation

I was recently thinking about all the billionaires that have been popping up in America (and elsewhere in the world). Now a billion dollars is a difficult thing to wrap my mind around, but after whipping out my trusty calculator (actually, it's a program built into my computer), I calculated that a fifty year old man with a billion dollars has to have made a lot of money. How much? How about $54,795 every day since he was born! Almost fifty-five thousand dollars a day, over and above what he spent, and that's every day (including weekends, though I didn't include leap year days).

People seem to treat them as if they're extremely capable and, usually, extremely lucky. I'm going to toss out another thought. They're also extremely rapacious and greedy. How about Bill Gates, who recently retired with about 70 billion dollars? He made more like $350,000 for every day of his life. Every day since he was born! That's atrocious.

The only way to make a dollar in commerce is to sell something to someone for a dollar more than it cost you to acquire it. There are many ways to trim the cost of acquisition such that it costs a dollar less than someone will pay. But think about the implications of that one-sided transaction happening over and over again, fifty-five thousand times a day, every day for fifty years.

I believe in community, in giving people a good deal, of helping out my neighbor when I'm in a position to do that. Drop a dollar in the poor box, tip the waiter 20%. People helped me out when I have been in need, and I, in turn have helped others. This species of reciprocal mutual aid is the opposite of profit, and guarantees none of us will become billionaires. There are too many opportunities to eschew the dollar profit on every transaction when my customer is also my neighbor.

So how about I propose this as a theory-- a billionaire becomes that as a result of his non-communitarian actions. Far from being a productive and helpful member of the community, the billionaire has proven his greed and insensitivity to his community by acquiring and holding onto all that wealth in the first place. How about instead of lauding the billionaires and treating them like royalty, we instead tax them for their greed and parasitism. It's not exactly punishment, but it's not reward either. That seems fair to me.