opinion | Billionaires don’t give anything to society – they take from it

Speeches around the world about the fortunes billionaires contribute in taxes and how much the poor and the middle class get from this forced generosity, is a literary genre in itself. Moreover, the genre is cultivated by the poor below, as Edward Bernays discovered, the genius of advertising: you must never say that what you want to sell is good, but have others say so instead.

In fact, billionaires do not give anything to society. They get back taxes on only a fraction of what they took from him.

That the poor and the workers (sorry for the repetition) defend the rich as good benefactors, is a direct result of such a propaganda strategy and is not just massive pollination, but rather an exploitation of the consumer’s vulnerability, like the desire to distinguish oneself. than his peers, and one day, even if it was a very distant day, to become part of that inaccessible elite.

In fact, billionaires do not give anything to society. They only take back taxes on a fraction of what they took from it thanks to their position of power in business (which is pretty much the only way to get into the one percent club).

This return is aptly described as a “redistribution of wealth” as if it were a donation or theft made by those below, the lazy workers, to those who sacrifice themselves and the intellectually gifted above. But the word itself hides the truth. It is not a distribution of wealth produced by a small section of society, but a redistribution of wealth produced by society as a whole, not only existing but all societies that preceded us and left to mankind a legacy of knowledge, discoveries, inventions, social struggles and progress.

In other words, every economic system is a system of redistribution of wealth, either from top to bottom through taxation or from bottom to top through production and consumption.

But social myths operate on power, and as such they are a semantic mask, an ideological mirror that reflects reality, but reflects it from left to right. Since it is actually billionaires who steal from workers every day and in a huge way (not only stealing wealth, but also political representation), the ideological narrative insists that those who want to grab from billionaires to hand them over to the poor are spoiling the “taxes that punish success” . This is another myth deeply rooted in society. It is the product of the same propaganda process of those with unequal social power, that is. Those who control the economy and finance. Those who own large media or affiliate companies through advertising. Those who are overrepresented in politics, such as pro-slavery states and the ruling class were in the nineteenth century. The same reasoning does not make a few workers (especially in the United States and its colonies), as few were slaves in the past, repeat another myth: it is the rich who create jobs. It is the rich who create prosperity.

Another myth is that the rich are successful because they know how to compete. Many of them can be creative, but their creativity is not invested in creating something new but in owning what has been created. Praise is given to special projects such as Elon Musk’s Space X as a model for private innovation. The irony is that his entire space project is built on nearly a century of successes and failures of government space agencies such as NASA and the space program of the Soviet Union, and long before that, the discoveries and advances of the Nazi government. Space X uses not only all this accumulated knowledge for which it has not invested a coin, but also the same NASA facilities and funds, that is, tax money.

The rich don’t compete. They destroy the competition. The rich do not create wealth. They accumulate it. The rich do not create knowledge. kidnap him. Rich people don’t come up with ideas. They demonize.

Everything or almost everything was created by paid inventors and researchers, and almost everything was funded by some governments.

Small and medium-sized entrepreneurs compete every day to provide a service, and in this way they get profits that allow them to survive and thrive as much as possible. But giants like Amazon or Walmart base their success not on competition but on the gradual destruction of that competition, which begins with the annihilation of small businesses through practices like covert dumping. Then he continues to exterminate other monsters, as happened in the United States with all kinds of chains such as Sears or Radio Shack. Amazon’s service is arguably effective, but anyone at any time in history with a super capital accumulation would be efficient because every new innovation would be at their disposal.

They have now been falsified as those who “created the world we live in”. What did Jeff Bezos invent? What did Bill Gates invent? What did Steve Jobs invent? What did Mark Zuckerberg invent? Historically, nothing but some make-up to centuries of cumulative progress. Sooner or later everything was invented by others who did not become billionaires or suffer from this terrible psychosocial illness. From the algorithms invented by the 9th-century Persian mathematician Jawarsim (or Algorithm) to computers, the Internet, software, email, social networks and all kinds of tools that make our world for better or worse. Everything or almost everything was created by paid inventors and researchers, and almost everything was funded by some governments. In most cases, capitalism didn’t even exist as a historical era, and when it did, its geniuses weren’t capitalists, with one or two questionable exceptions.

Let’s not confuse media propaganda or the cultural industry. The object of every great corporation, of every great corporation, is not to contribute to an invention of humanity or to benefit anyone other than its owners through the foreclosure and accumulation of wealth resulting from a long history of technological and social progress, the product of great effort by the rest of society with its public and private institutions. To think otherwise is like insisting that the job of a fisherman who casts his nets is to breed fish. Every giant company is just a giant fishing net. Everything else is verse and not the best.

Billionaires are justified only by their economic power, the propaganda that emerges from that power, and the political power they snatch for their own business. This propaganda is so effective that it can fake reality until a humble food truck salesman with assistants identifies himself with one of these postmodern heroes (now businessmen) and directs his frustration and political anger at his employees who differ only in title. However, all three remained workers; Neither businessman Jeff Bezos nor Mauricio Macri.

A billionaire can be a good person, but his historical and social role is the elegant and legitimate robbery of the rest of society. Exciting robbery, needless to say, because a large part of people want to become billionaires, as in fairy tales. But, as in fairy tales, only poor Cinderella can marry a prince; Not two, let alone a million. In a club of one percent, there is no place for more, but for less.