If Joe Biden announced that he would stay president for life and pass down the title to his children, people would be outraged. They'd have great reason to be so. The appointment of the President of the United States is for the citizens of the United States to decide, not him. But even as the undemocratic accumulation and passing down of power by the president would likely stoke civil war, it goes unnoticed when the perpetrators are instead each of our over 700 billionaires. You see, they too accumulate and pass far more power than is afforded to the average citizen, and more importantly, they wield it. They break the rules of our democratic system. Look at these three facts:
- We live in a society where citizens share power over the country
- We live in a society where money is power
- We live in a society that allows people to gain and inherit unlimited amounts of money (or assets worth money)
Because of fact 2, facts 1 and 3 are contradictory. Since money is power, we therefore allow people to gain and inherit unlimited amounts of power for themselves, even as we espouse the sharing of it. This is not to say that simply being more wealthy than someone else is tyranny, but billionaires, with their egregious amounts of money, have an egregious amount of power as well, and it gives them far more than the equal say in our nation's running that everyone else gets.
For example, look at the debate over free speech in social media. Whether or not services that identify as platforms have the same right to curate discussion as publishers is an important question, and one that should logically be answered by our elected officials. However, Elon Musk's decision to join the Twitter Board of Directors and his claim that he'd simply buy the company outright took this choice from us. A proponent of free speech on the internet, he'd certainly cause a decrease of censorship on the site in either case. Whether or not you agree with him or would support those actions, the fact remains that he used his overabundance of money and therefore power to make a decision that was yours, mine, and everybody else's to make. We did not vote for Elon Musk to decide for us.
But he's not alone in abusing his wealth-based power, not by a long shot. What about the Koch Brothers (minus a brother)? They have used their money to lobby our government into keeping us dependent on personal transportation and fossil fuels. The oil magnates did so because the proliferation of fuel-efficient public transportation and fuel-replacing renewable energy would cut into their profits. We did not vote for the Kochs to decide our relationship with these things, yet they've used their power as billionaires to overrule any dissenting opinion we could have.
Far closer to home for this sub, the Walton Family, founders and significant shareholders of Walmart, the nation's largest employer, also display flagrant amounts of capitalist-sanctioned tyranny. In this case, it's their lobbying in support of social services such as welfare. Why would they do this? Because having the taxpayer ensure that their employees don't starve to death means that they can pay them as little as possible without consequence. While I actually agree with this choice if not the motive behind it, I also recognize that it's a choice made without any of our input. Whether you're for or against the welfare state, you did not vote for the Waltons to make a decision on it.
As you can see, the massive amount of wealth that billionaires are allowed to have gives them power to make unilateral decisions in our country regardless of how the other 330 million of us feel about it. Their existence is a perversion of the principles that the US was founded upon and must therefore be prohibited. But let's say that you still disagree. You may still believe that billionaires have a right to the money they earned and the right to make more, even if it creates an unfair share of power. Fine, but that belief applies to more than just billionaires. What about the monarchs and despots of old? They “earned” their power as well. They and their ancestors conquered and negotiated and married for it over generations. Your logic infers that they too were the rightful owners of their power. However, it also goes against the very spirit of democracy. The old tyrants were removed because people realized that every person deserves an equal say, and the new ones shouldn't be treated any differently.