My friends, it's time for real talk. This billionaire crime spree cannot go on. For too long now, the ultra-rich have been getting away with murder by outsourcing and off-shoring their murderousness while hiding all their hyper-profits in a post office box in the Bahamas. Enough is enough. It's time to bring these caviar psychopaths to justice and make them face the muzak, the tinny, grating soundtrack the rest of us put up with as we shuffle through the depressing dollar shop of late-stage capitalism.
Make them pay by making them poor. Not by imposing fines or levying taxes on their vast, ill-gotten gains. They laugh at fines. And for billionaires, taxes are something other people pay. Specifically—poor people. So from now on, whenever a billionaire ruins everything, I propose a schedule of summary punishments forcing them to live like us.
Some examples?
For transforming the basic human need for shelter into a maximum addressable housing market, offering a minimal viable product for a truly inexcusable rate of return on investment, the sentence shall be life in a boarding house with one regularly blocked toilet shared between nine destitute men living on canned curried sausages.
For the practice of always opposing even the smallest minimum wage rises, busting unions, and generally rigging the system to ensure a steady supply of desperate wage slaves, the punishment shall be standing in line at Aldi, using the in-store Wi-Fi on your cheap Chinese phone to frantically transfer money you don’t have from an empty savings account into an overdrawn credit card to buy five kilos of strangely inexpensive mystery meat.
For engaging in reckless financial manipulation that destabilizes whole economies and jeopardizes the security of millions, the sentence is an ‘accidental’ group text to all the other billionaires saying, “Honey, I don’t know what to tell you, that was the end of our money in the bank account. We’ll have to use credit cards for the rest of the month.”
Punishments such as this are an important deterrent to billionaire behaviour because they return shame to an equation from which the possession of billions of dollars had previously excised it. It is simply not enough that criminal billionaires should be made to give up their hand-stitched silk pillows filled with truffles and baby hamsters. For a sanction to be truly effective, we must all know that instead, they have laid their head down to sleep on a plastic bag stuffed with newspapers. Preferably old newspapers, now gone out of business, because the guilty billionaire’s hedge fund bought the masthead, stripped the assets, and dumped the carcass online to harvest as much clickbait as possible.
Being poor because some billionaire stole the surplus value of your labor and stashed it in the Cayman Islands means having to do things clumsily with the cheapest possible materials and hating the results. It’s the difference between jetting off in your Gulfstream 650 to your private island resort for a week’s partying with the superhot and superrich and… scooping a sneaky handful of microwave mac-n-cheese for breakfast on the overcrowded bus to your shitty place of inescapable employment.
I invite you to imagine a world where maybe you can’t get to that fantasy island where Elon, Rupe, and Jeff Bezos are playing nude badminton with the girls from Blackpink, but we can definitely put them on that bus to nowhere with a handful of cold, congealed macaroni and cheese for their crimes.
How columns work.
Time to open the kimono a little. I didn’t come up with the idea for this column. My kids did - last night at dinner. They just started riffing on the idea of punishing billionaires appropriately. (The idea that billionaires deserved punishment on general principles was not in question. They’ve been raised right).
They somehow knew that what billionaires would dread most was living like most people. The idea was striking. So much so that I immediately began to take notes on my phone, intrigued by its potential even though I had no idea about a final form.
However, when I set out to write this morning, I quickly recognized a significant risk. In my research—sifting through stories and testimonies online by people who'd directly experienced real poverty—I recognised there was a real chance of inadvertently mocking the very struggle I wanted to spotlight. Any attempt to lampoon the grotesqueries of extreme wealth, which often thrives on the backs of the poor, could easily slip into belittling the poor.
I must admit there was a 10 or 15-minute period where I thought maybe I should just beat up on Peter Dutton today. But I can’t do that every week. (Maybe every second week?) The challenge, anyway, lies in tackling complex and sensitive subjects with some care while steering clear of the obvious pitfalls. I hope I've managed to do so today.
Substack notes? Yes? No?
I do most of my Substack reading in the app, which is pretty good. It has an odd little function called ‘Notes’ which seems to be Substack’s attempt to eat Twitter’s lunch. It’s micro-blogging again.
I don’t post ‘notes’ because I figure nobody will see them. But sometimes I’ll read something during the week which I think of as ‘Boobworthy’, even going so far as to save it to my Apple Notes app for a closer look on Thursday and Friday when it comes time to put the column together.
Often, nothing comes of it.
If anyone is interested in following these ‘notes,’ let me know. I could start posting them to Substack. It wouldn’t go out as an email (Thank fuck. There’s already too much email in the world). Basically, it’d be a link to something I found interesting throughout the week. I might write about it. More likely not.
Let me know.
(I’ve turned on comments for everyone. Don’t make me regret that)
Cool idea, even cooler idea the self awareness about the perception of possible poverty porn. I like your ideas, another suggestion I have seen suggested by Mikel Jollett on Redditt "no more Billionaires. None. After you reach $999 million every red cent goes to schools and health care. You get a trophy that says "I won capitalism" and we name a dog park after you".
Along with the uber rich we need to deal with opulence of the religion industry, confiscate all their hilltop real estate and demolish their edifices for the construction of homes for the needy. If there is an outcry then replace their hilltops with flood prone riverside real estate recovered from buyouts by local councils. Churches on stilts could become a new novel form of architecture.