Billionaires shouldn't exist. There shouldn't be people on our planet who earn thousands of millions of dollars while others are dying of poverty.
Billionaires can only buy so much, cars, houses, islands; there comes a point where they're not just buying material objects, but they're buying people, governments.
The top 8 richest billionaires own as much combined wealth as half the human race; that translates to world's richest 1% owning 44% of the wealth of the world. 2,150 billionaires have a combined net worth of $10 trillion, only $30 billion is required annually to end world starvation. $10 trillion is 10,000 billion so if they each gave away a portion of their wealth, they could easily end world hunger. As humans, it is our responsibility to help people less fortunate than us to the best of our abilities, so asking billionaires to give away small quantities of their salaries to help the less fortunate isn't unreasonable. Unsurprisingly, it's very hard to make a billion dollars ethically, the majority of billionaires have made their money through exploitation; not paying their workers and tax evasion. The predominance of these billion dollar magnates force their employees to slave away for 12 hours a day, while they sit in their mansions planning their next excursions to outer space, thousands of miles away from where the work is actually being done. In 2017, the Guardian wrote an article regarding the treatment of employees of Apple in 3rd world countries. In the Chinese city of Longhua, the city home to the largest factory producing apple goods, 28 workers tried to or did commit suicide in one year. The factories had notoriously dreadful working conditions, workers lived in the factory, where they lived in decrepit and cramped dormitories. Management severely and violently punished workers who disobeyed their strict rules or didn’t meet working standards. They worked 12 hour days and were stuck in this endless cycle. This caused a huge number of suicides, workers throwing themselves off buildings. In response to these suicides, Apple installed nets outside the windows to catch the workers who tried to commit suicide.
Most people haven’t grasped how much a billion dollars actually is, most people won’t see a million dollars in their lives nevermind a billion, a billion is 1000 times that. Take a minute now to think about how you would spend one billion dollars…ideas you may have thought of are cars, houses or holidays. The world’s billionaires however, spend their wealth to increase their personal or even political gains. Everyone's aware of what happened with Cambridge Analytica: Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president and billionaire, hired a company to exploit and harvest the data of millions of American voters. The company targeted these voters by bombarding them with Republican propoganda, psychologically manipulating them to vote for Trump. And America isn't the only place where billionaire candidates have hired companies like Cambridge Analytica to orchestrate their elections, countries such as India, Colombia, Australia the UK and Italy have also done so. If we allow billionaires to have such large sums of money, and therefore influence, these people will end up dominating the political landscape, blocking out the voices of the the backbone of society. In a world of such political and social unrest, the involvement of billionaires is the nail in the coffin on equality between the poor and rich, furthering the wealth and social divide. Is it ethical for anyone to have masses of money while others are suffering from starvation, poverty and disease?
If you made $5000 everyday since Christopher Columbus arrived, you still wouldn’t have the same amount of money as Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos is worth $120 billion, on the other hand, his workers get paid $16 per hour, delivering packages to customers; that's 837,500 times less than the $13.4 million that Bezos rakes in per hour. Some of his workers aren’t even paid minimum wage, and work in factories which have machines monitering their productivity, causing employees to have anxiety when taking liberties like their lunch breaks. Surely the richest man in the world should be able to afford decent factories for his workers to labour in, and surely he should be able to pay them minimum wage? Furthermore, his workers have to pay 12% tax on their salaries, which are usually around $20,000 while Jeff Bezos paid a total of 1.5% of tax on his income last year in the USA. However, there is an issue which also resides with the governments, anyone who earns over $150,000, is in the same tax bracket as Jeff Bezos in the UK, paying 45% tax. Obviously he should have to pay more considering he earns billions more than them? This is one of the many problems of the taxation system. Billionaires hoard the wealth of others, they bring in billions of dollars, but don't pay tax, meaning they're not giving sufficient amounts of money back to the economy. Although, it cannot be ignored that Jeff Bezos does donate to charity, he donated $98 million to homelessness charities across the USA last year, which is obviously a huge sum of money, but actually only 0.08% of his net worth. Billionaires don't care about their employees or helping people, they only care about their annual profits and growth of their companies, it doesn't matter to them how many jobs are lost or how much money the lower classes lose, billionares are on such an elevated stage that they have no idea or concern what life is like for poor people.
Overall, I believe that the existance of billionaires is wrong for many reasons, firstly the inhumanity of the mass of wealth that they own, secondly the fact that they can't even provide proper working conditions for their employees and thirdly because their severe abundance of wealth gives them a preposterous amount of power.
