I’ve been wanting to make fun of a specific breed of people I’ve seen becoming more and more popular over the past decade: the rich person who hates billionaires.

Picture the scene. One camp: a streamer in his Hollywood mansion in the bright glow of his halo ring light, ranting about wealth inequality as his most loyal viewers donate their last five bucks so he can “let Bezos have it.” Other camp: Ms. Politicián in her gentrified luxury apartment, in silk robes, thundering against capitalism as her yearly 200k in royalties for her 5th book cashes in. Same spiel, different stage.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t paid off by Big Billionaire so I could suckle out the remaining drops left in their diamond goblets. I’m not here to defend them or really say anything about them. You can project whatever you want onto me and take this article however you like. I’m more so here to poke a little fun at these grifters by taking their arguments to the logical extreme. Will I be fair? Not really, but it’s not like any of these people are, either.

The Twitch Streamer

Oh, the Valkyraes and Pokimanes and the Hasans of the internet. So famous and so popular while complaining about Elon Musk hoarding all that cheddar while wiping their asses with Versace velvet. “The rich need to pay more taxes,” they say as they look at the formula on their third 4K monitor:

$$\text{rich} = \text{person with more money than me}$$

I mean, how tone deaf does this sound? Not really, apparently, as their chat blows up with affirmation and admiration. I understand. I mean, they only have ten million dollars and Jeff Bezos has ten-thousandfold. Clearly, it’s not their responsibility, as they take donations from people who have ten-thousand times less money than them.

These people have fuck you money and then some, with lifestyles more on par with the billionaires they despise than the people they chat with. They might not have multiple mega mansions, but they live with the same comfort of never having to worry about money ever again.

And this is where I find their anger unjustified because they defer most, if not all responsibility away from themselves. It’s always the bigger fish to feed all mouths, but can’t the slightly smaller ones do the same? They’re in the top 0.01% globally with monthly passive income that exceeds the lifetime earnings of most of their viewers. They may not be the apex predators but they’re certainly near the tippy top of the food chain. Their total contempt outward and not toward themselves screams cognitive dissonance.

Do you think Pokimane doesn’t hire professional accountants and tax attorneys and advisors to manage her wealth and income? Do you think Hasan is eating cup noodles at 2 am so he can file his Twitch subs as personal income on TurboTax? Do you think they’re not getting massive tax write-offs through an LLC or marking sponsorships as deductible marketing costs? They game the system in the exact same way. They’re not paying an extra 20% in taxes so the government can fill an extra half of a pothole.

Fundamentally, they must think the magical redistribution of these billionaires’ wealth would somehow make all economic problems melt away. That if they just paid 10% more in taxes (while keeping their mansions), everyone would be riding the High Roller with bottles of Rosé Dom Pérignon. They don’t think billionaires should exist, and that every dollar above more money than I have should be whisked away by Big Daddy Government and efficiently placed in the hands of the very same bureaucrats who spend ten billion dollars drawing a picture of a bullet train they’ll never build.

Why stop here? We can take this thinking to the logical extreme, where every extra dollar that they don’t need shall be arbitrarily siphoned away to someone else who needs it more. I mean, do you really need more than five million dollars? We can take all the extra money and distribute it to each homeless person in San Francisco. I mean, five million is sure a lot. How about every dollar above one million? How about five hundred thousand? A hundred bands? I mean, people can’t buy bread out here. Do you really need all those extra dollars? How about we let you keep the median income and confiscate the rest? How about every person ever who makes a dollar more than anyone else must split that dollar amongst everyone else? Oh, you won’t be happy? Too bad, we need your money. Joe Schmoe down the street can’t afford food or a home.

And for that fact, fuck everyone in the United States. The median income in the U.S. is the 93rd percentile globally. We can’t all have a hundred grand while Jose in Venezuela has to eat dog to survive the night. Everyone in the U.S. shall distribute every extra dollar above the global mean until everyone everywhere has the exact same amount of money. Won’t income inequality be solved? Hurrah!

You could say one billionaire could make up for all the Valkyraes of the world, but at the moral level, what’s the difference? Shouldn’t you put your money where your mouth is? Is donating 1% of your net worth to charity your get out of jail free card? If Bezos doesn’t do it, you might as well, because you care about people going hungry, right? Or do you just hate Bezos more than you care about them? You tell me. The real charity here is Pokimane’s Twitch chat.

Yeah, it’s the Socialists

Then, we have the grifters in the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Zohran Mamdani. We have one gal who sells $80 fuck capitalism hoodies while wearing a trillion dollar “tax the rich” dress to the Met Gala. We have an old hack who’s accomplished nothing within his 69 years in the Senate screaming jibberish about oligarchy and capitalism in his third lakefront property. And we have our new mayor, yes, who probably has never worried about money and has barely worked a day in his life.¹

As public servants, they should have even more of a duty to bleed every single unnecessary dollar back to the taxpayers. Sell that Tesla AOC, buy an eco-friendly bike and give the rest to the criminals that got arrested for supposedly stealing bread. Bernie, I think one house is enough and there are hundreds of poor families that could use your jetted tub. And Zohran, make sure your mayoral salary goes to the poor subway rats that can’t even afford a rent-stabilized broom closet.

They’ll happily sell you books for royalties that they don’t need (and don’t share with their local commune) while paying their campaign managers a hundred thousand dollars to tweet once a week. Oh yeah, the IRS allows all Americans to donate more than they owe as tax. Seemingly, no one participated, not even the great AOC or Bernie Sanders. Mamdani, you have a job now, so I better see at least a few figures on the extra tax form next April.

They masquerade their disdain for the rich as empathy for the poor. Strip away the megaphone and what you’re left with is envy dressed up with false compassion. They’d rather be seen helping the poor than actually helping the poor. They want to hear the applause as they post the new photo op and publish their new book. All I can feel in their words is hatred and not love for the dispossessed—a theater act meant only to impress and nothing else. They live lives closer to the oligarchs than to the struggling families they represent. And their followers eat it up not because their lives are improving, but because it feels good to see their hero say what they want to hear. Years later, all the screaming has culminated in the chosen one, with perhaps the real power to enact the change they’ve been seeking—where its abject failure will only fuel their supporters’ martyrdom. When they try to enact an economic system that’s failed every single time it’s been tried, they’ll take the same escape route of claiming that the system was too corrupt to let them succeed.

And when the dust settles, the rich will stay rich and the poor will stay poor, and they’ll continue to go on press tours and chant the same slogans they’ve done time and time again. Either that, or the system collapses beneath their feet. Only time will tell.

Incentives

The one thing none of these people even consider are the incentives that will be destroyed if they get what they want. They believe only greed drives the richest rich, and that forcefully restraining wealth creation will somehow fix everything. All economic incentives will flip on their heads, and these people are not smart enough to at least admit they have no idea what the fallout could be.

Their greed-free utopia still needs someone to build the iPhone. A pat on the back, participation trophy, and a capped median wage is probably not enough for hundreds of engineers to volunteer 80-hour weeks to literally change the world.

They think the rich operate on greed and greed alone, while they would take ten dollars in change after putting a twenty in a homeless man’s cup. Much of the rich are bombastic greedy assholes, but taxing them all to hell is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Greed is universal. We all want the latest iPhone, the best deal, and the fancy vacation. To tame all greed is to change the human condition, and if they want to embark on that endeavor, I wish them the best of luck.

This is not to say greed has not gotten out of control. But, the performative, self-righteous slogan hollering is not a solution, but an anti-solution. It’s the amputation of a cut leg.

Conclusion

All of these people above have identified a real problem and a problem that’s worth solving. However, they raise an elementary school-level description of said problem and vomit out the most surface-level, bumper-sticker cause-and-effect solution possible. They’ll confiscate a yacht or two, mail everyone a check, claim the economy and supply chains are run on vibes, and usher in the utopia. The Light will shine on their faces as God himself realizes the simple solution that was staring us in the face—one that remedies every single vice and virtue known to man.

When they’ve had their way, we can all finally make our way to the state-owned grocery store where everything is free and retrieve our eco-farmed lab-grown tuna quinoa salad. We can then walk to the Apple store that’s powered by a commune of volunteer engineers working solely motivated by their compassion toward the poor (which don’t exist anymore) so we can trade our monthly credits for the new iPhone. When we go home, we can each take turns sharing Hasan’s rig by lottery—where chat donations are immediately vaporized and redistributed to all eight billion people of the world. And the city rats, because they’re human, too.