So, you've won capitalism: My open letter to the billionaires

The National

5 days ago

I think we can all agree that you've won capitalism. If the goal of capitalism is to accumulate wealth via the canny deployment of capital (yours or someone else's) for the purpose of spending that wealth on goods and services to improve your own lifestyle, then you have been successful beyond measure.
As a billionaire, you now possess more wealth than can be reasonably spent by any individual in a lifetime. In fact, you passed that measure a long, long time ago.
In the UK, we can measure how much income is required for a household to enjoy the minimum basic level of a 'decent life'. The UK Minimum Income Standard is developed by asking people what such a life looks like. How much does it cost to buy enough food? What does a 'decent' household spend on energy? How many holidays should a person reasonably expect to be able to go on in a year? What kind of budget should someone have to spend on hobbies? Various other questions like that build up a picture of a minimally 'decent' life.
Perhaps it will surprise you to learn that what the people of the UK consider to be a 'decent' life is both far less than you earn and far more than many households earn. For a household of two adults and two children, the UK Minimum Income Standard is approximately £71,000 per year (to be split amongst all income earners in the household).
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For a single adult living alone, it's £28,000 per year. At the current UK minimum wage, a single person living alone but with a full-time job only earns around £25,000 in a year. That four-person household of two adults and two children would require 2.8 full-time minimum wage jobs to sustain a minimally decent life.
For you, though, you could earn that lifestyle in the most trivial way possible. You don't even need to call up one of those very, very expensive accountants who spend a lot of your money finding ways to make the rest of it 'more tax efficient'. A 50-year UK Government Gilt right now yields about 4.9% interest.
So to generate enough interest to pay for a decent lifestyle for your partner and your two children for very likely the rest of your life, you only need to buy £1.5 million worth of bonds. If you happen to be living alone, then the cost drops to £570,000.
Is a passive income sufficient to provide a minimally decent life not enough? You could double it, treble it, multiply it by ten even. Your wealth far outstrips what humans can easily visualise. There's a joke: What's the difference between a billionaire and a millionaire? Answer: About a billion.
Is that not enough? The Global Billionaire Set increased their collective wealth by something like $14 trillion between 2015 and 2025. Had that wealth instead been distributed evenly to every adult and child on Earth, each one of us could have instead been given a cheque this year for $1600.
(Image: Brian Lawless/Nick Wass/AP/PA/PA Wire)
And this wouldn't have even touched the $12 trillion you and your mates had before 2015. You could lose almost everything and still be richer than most folk will ever be.
There's an odd thing that happens when we talk about trying to make poor people less poor. When we talk about policies like a Universal Basic Income, one of the objections that always seems to come up is that if poor people aren't threatened with destitution, if they're 'just given' enough money to survive on, then they'll all just stop working.
But you know that's not true, don't you – because you didn't. When you won capitalism and accumulated enough to live comfortably on for the rest of eternity, you kept trying to accumulate more.
Maybe you did it for bad reasons like sheer greed and maybe you did it for better reasons like the love and passion you have for whatever it is that you do.
You can no longer even be considered a 'wealth creator'. Oxfam published a report this year called 'Takers, Not Makers' that examined the level of wealth extraction by billionaires around the world – particularly in the Global South, but also in countries like the UK. They showed that the UK's 57 billionaires increased their personal fortunes by almost £13 billion in 2024.
The thing is, the entire UK economy only grew by about £7bn that year. This implies that the GDP only went up because the billionaire wealth pot went up by more than the rest of the UK economy went down. In other words, we all had a recession that the stats didn't show because you took all the cash.
I think the solution should be acceptable in either case. Either you don't deserve your wealth or it's simply not what motivates you and you don't need it. So we can safely tax it from you.
The UK has been talking a lot about wealth taxes lately. I joined that conversation recently too with my own plan to reform council tax to better tax your mansions, castles and to encourage you to divest from your rented property portfolios (what the rest of us call 'homes') as well as to tax land ownership in Scotland.
Various proposals to better tax wealth via Capital Gains, taxes on financial transactions, or on pension funds will all play their role too and may be particularly suited to better taxing mere millionaires.
But billionaires like yourself are in another league and require other solutions. Even income taxes of 90% or higher won't dent wealth piles that are tens of thousands of times deeper than the resources of an average person.
So maybe we just need a rule where we cap the maximum wealth that a single person can command. Once you've won capitalism – we can set that level as high as a billion or perhaps somewhere lower than that – money and wealth are no longer yours alone. Everything you acquire above that gets placed into a publicly-owned trust – we could call it a Common Good Fund.
This would ensure that any wealth you do create from now on does actually benefit all of us rather than not 'trickling down' as we're always promised it would. If we did this in the UK right now with all wealth above one billion we'd instantly have a fund worth more than £7000 per person in Britain. That's the real monetary cost of maintaining billionaires in the world.
But ending extreme wealth inequality also shields us from the political and social costs too. The moment someone becomes wealthy enough to have more power than their single vote, they become a threat to the very concept of democracy.
Do I expect you and your billionaire friends to agree to this? Probably not. I expect to see some dissent even from folk who are immeasurably closer to destitution than they are to joining you. But it's a proposal that can easily be reversed.
If we try it and it doesn't work, we can all vote to give the Common Good Fund back to those who used to own it. A few thousand billionaires vs the rest of us. Let the votes land where they may.
Yours, expectantly ...
Andrew Tickell returns next week