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Debate: Abolish Billionaires

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have both said that the super-rich should pay much more in taxes. When even billionaires are questioning their own right to exist, should we not do the same?

‘At some level, no one deserves that much money.’ That’s what Mark Zuckerberg has said about his fellow billionaires. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have both said that the super-rich should pay much more in taxes. When even billionaires are questioning their own right to exist, should we not do the same? To their detractors, the very existence of billionaires is a sign of policy failure. Only under a system that is rigged in favour of exploitative rent-seekers could a class of people holding such a vast proportion of the world’s wealth have emerged. As for the defence that billionaires do a huge amount of good through their philanthropy, why should the underpaid and disadvantaged have to rely on the largesse of these self-appointed benefactors? What we need is an economic system that distributes wealth fairly – not through charity but via a democratically accountable state. 

That’s the argument of the billionaire-bashers, but is it a fair one? Don’t we all in fact benefit from the way the world’s greatest entrepreneurs are able to provide us with products and services more cheaply and efficiently than ever before? Do we really want to see a world where there is no incentive for the next Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates to take a risk? In fact, some economists argue that concentration of wealth promotes economic growth. Billionaires often reinvest their money in their own companies, creating more jobs, or in the stock market so that other businesses can do the same. Making Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg poorer is not going to make the 99 per cent any richer. It might make the envious feel better but it isn’t a rational economic argument. Let’s leave the billionaires alone. 


Speakers

For The Motion

Linsey McGoey

Professor of Sociology and director of the Centre for Economic Sociology and Innovation at the University of Essex


Professor of Sociology and director of the Centre for Economic Sociology and Innovation at the University of Essex. She is the author of two books No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy and most recently The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World, and has written for The New York Times and Guardian newspaper on why billionaires are harmful for society.
Against The Motion

Ryan Bourne

R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics at Cato Institute


R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics at Cato Institute. He is a regular public commentator on the economy and author of Economics in One Virus: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning through COVID-19 named in the Financial Times summer reads for 2021.
Chair

Ben Chu

Economics Editor of BBC Newsnight


Economics Editor of Newsnight, the BBC's flagship news and current affairs programme. He was previously economics editor of the Independent and is author of Chinese Whispers: Why Everything You’ve Heard About China is Wrong.

 

Speakers subject to change.