Summer Reruns Dep't.: No Billionaires
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 136
Indignity's editor is traveling. Meanwhile, as the Jeff Bezos Washington Post sheds staff all the way down to fact-checking ghoul Glenn Kessler and CBS pays a bribe to the president to smooth its way to being bought by an adult child of Larry Ellison, we present a piece from the archives of our predecessor publication, Hmm Daily, offering a simply policy suggestion: we need to forbid the existence of billionaires.
No Billionaires
SOME IDEAS ABOUT how to make the world better require careful, nuanced thinking about how best to balance competing interests. Others don’t: Billionaires are bad. We should presumptively get rid of billionaires. All of them.
Does this sound like an incitement to the most dreaded kind of revolution, when people are struck down by the mob simply on the basis of some crude simple standard? It is not. The people who have a billion dollars are fine; they may go on living. It is just that, for the sake of everyone else (and, honestly, for their own sake) they must not be allowed to possess a billion dollars.
No one needs a billion dollars. No one deserves a billion dollars. There is a widespread moral and conceptual error, in a society saturated in the ideology of competition and monetary success, that the property a person has gotten does not simply belong to that person but is, somehow, itself an embodiment of their personhood—that to separate a person from property is to attack their human existence.
This is true to an extent—to the extent that property secures a person food, and shelter, and physical security, and health and futurity. Even, despite the inequities and injustices that have emerged by this level, a person’s opportunities to have leisure, to make art, etc.
None of this comes anywhere near adding up to a billion dollars.
Another error is the belief that billionaires have made their money by adding value to society, of which they take a minor share. One pictures some great industrialist inventing and manufacturing a useful item, which makes every single person’s life better, and in return receiving a small share of the price of the item.
A kindergarten teacher, teaching 25 new people a year not to bite each other and to work in occasional harmony with strangers, produces far more social good in a lifetime than an industrialist does. Even to picture the billionaire as a productive industrialist is too optimistic—read up and down the Forbes list, larded with monopolists, retailers, retail monopolists, the heirs of retail monopolies, real estate magnates, Mark Zuckerberg.
What do they do with all their extra money? They buy atrocious houses. They shut down publications. They buy politicians, over and under the table. Now a whole batch of them have moved directly into government—and we have the most corrupt and incompetent executive branch in memory to show for it.
When we speak of the better billionaires, we simply mean the ones who are not actively malignant. There are no good billionaires. There may be some relatively good people who are attached to a pile of money that stacks one billion dollars high, but the money does not improve them. It makes them worse. Their good points would be no less good if they held only, say, 500 million dollars. And their bad points would be that much less of a problem for anyone else.
WEATHER REVIEW
Cape Town, July 28, 2025
★★★★ The winter chill inside the hotel gave way to piercingly warm sun outside, reminding the children that they'd skipped their sunscreen. Amid the green of the pines and the palms and sundry other kinds of evergreens, some groves of deciduous trees stood seasonally bare and budding. A blanket of brown lay low over the landscape under the cloudless sky, while Table Mountain thrust up its flat clean profile above. Unfamiliar gulls gave their rusty, descending cries as the smell of kelp rose from the rocks and a white haze hung over the water. Mostly what was on the air was the smell of burning fuel, like February in Beijing, only with blue overhead and bright water with dolphins leaping clear of it. The wrong-way crescent moon rode in the sky at sundown, and the city lights twinkled under the smog blanket now grown pale in the gathering dust. It was time to put on a second jacket already.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS THE Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
POD JOB DEP'T. Vacation season is upon us and the Indignity Morning Podcast Studio anticipates a two week shutdown unless some un-ignorable piece of news breaks, and I find myself with unstructured time and a connection to the Internet, but, assuming nothing unexpected happens in either direction, we will talk again on August 11th.
ADVICE DEP'T.
HEY! DO YOU like advice columns? They don't happen unless you send in some letters! Surely you have something you want to justify to yourself, or to the world at large. Now is the perfect time to share it with everyone else through The Sophist, the columnist who is not here to correct you, but to tell you why you're right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from The White House Cook Book: A Comprehensive Cyclopedia of Information for the Home, by Hugo Ziemann and Mrs. Fanny Lemira Gillette, published in 1919, and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
SARDINE SANDWICHES.
TAKE two boxes of sardines and throw the contents into hot water, having first drained away all the oil. A few minutes will free the sardines from grease. Pour away the water and dry the fish in a cloth; then scrape away the skins and pound the sardines in a mortar till reduced to paste; add pepper, salt, and some tiny pieces of lettuce, and spread on the sandwiches, which have been previously cut as above. The lettuce adds very much to the flavor of the sardines.
Or chop the sardines up fine and squeeze a few drops of lemon juice into them, and spread between buttered bread or cold biscuits.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net .
SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
Indignity is presented on Ghost. Indignity recommends Ghost for your Modern Publishing needs. Indignity gets a slice if you do this successfully!
