I Am Not Envious of Billionaires. I Pity Them.
I am a liberal. Not a leftist. The distinction matters, and I want to make it precisely, because the two are regularly conflated by people who should know better — including, often, the liberals themselves.
Leftism, as a political posture, is largely organized around envy. The billionaire has too much, therefore I am owed more. The redistribution is the point, the grievance is the fuel, and the fuel requires the resentment to keep burning. I understand the emotional logic. I do not share it. I do not envy the wealth of billionaires. I hold them in something closer to pathos — the particular sadness you feel when you watch an intelligent person make themselves into something smaller than their intelligence.
I know whereof I speak. I have been inside that world. I have sat at those tables, been on those boats, called some of those people my friends. Whether they still consider me one, I cannot say with confidence. They don’t talk to me much anymore. But I have seen the interior of that life, and what I saw was not what the outside imagines.
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What you find, inside that world, is a microcosm culture organized entirely around the appreciation of material attainment. The friendships are real, in their way — but they are friendships built around the spoils. The conversation is the boat, the island, the next acquisition, the comparative assessment of each other’s taste in things. The people are often genuinely intelligent. That is what makes it so surprising, and so sad. They have taken their intelligence and pointed it entirely at the accumulation of objects and the status those objects confer, and they have been so successful at this project that they have forgotten — if they ever knew — that the project was supposed to be in service of something else. Something that might actually fill a life.
It does not fill a life. This is the thing I want to say clearly, as someone who has watched it from close range: the life organized around the acquisition of wealth and the things wealth buys is a surprisingly shallow existence. Not cruel, not monstrous — not yet — but shallow in the way that a very wide, very still body of water can be shallow. Impressive from a distance. Not somewhere you’d want to drown.
This is not a political observation. It is a philosophical one, and it is not original to me. Aristotle said it. The Stoics said it. Every serious tradition of human inquiry into the good life has arrived at the same conclusion: that the person who organizes their existence around external goods — wealth, status, the admiration of others — has made a category error. They have confused the instruments of a good life for the thing itself. The billionaire with the yacht is not happy in any philosophically serious sense of the word. He is distracted. There is a difference.
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So when I argue — and I do argue — that billionaires should be taxed and their political power regulated, I am not speaking from resentment. I am speaking from justice and from the principle of self-government. The concentrated wealth is a problem not because it offends me that someone owns an island. It is a problem because concentrated wealth becomes concentrated power, and concentrated power in a republic is the thing the republic was specifically designed to prevent. This is not a difficult argument. It is, in fact, the founding argument. The Founders understood that a republic could not survive the emergence of an aristocracy, and that the prevention of aristocracy required the active maintenance of conditions that made it impossible. We stopped maintaining those conditions. Here we are.
The resentment argument — the leftist argument — actually weakens this case. It makes the policy question a matter of feeling rather than principle, and feelings can be argued with, dismissed, attributed to envy or bitterness or class grievance. The principle cannot be argued with in the same way. Either you believe in self-government or you don’t. Either you believe that the concentration of political power in private hands is incompatible with a functioning republic, or you don’t. My belief has nothing to do with how I feel about the yacht.
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What changed for me — what moved me from the inside of that world to the outside of it — was not the wealth itself. It was the moment when the people who had spent their lives accumulating it decided that what they really wanted was to rule.
The philosopher king is Plato’s fantasy, and it is a dangerous one. The idea that the person who has demonstrated mastery in one domain — commerce, technology, the accumulation of capital — therefore possesses the wisdom to govern the rest of us is not an argument. It is a non sequitur dressed up as a credential. The skills that build a billion-dollar company are not the skills of democratic self-governance. They are, in many cases, the opposite skills — the skills of unilateral decision-making, the elimination of friction, the subordination of all other considerations to the single metric of growth. These are not the skills you want in a person who holds power over other people’s lives. They are the skills of a person who has never been told no by anyone who could make it stick.
These people now see themselves as philosopher kings. They would rule us better than we rule ourselves. They have said so, plainly, in public, with the calm confidence of people who have never seriously entertained the possibility that they might be wrong. And it turns out — it should not surprise us, but it does, a little, every time — that the kinds of people who strive for that kind of power, who need that much wealth and that much dominance and that much control over the world around them, are the kinds of people who end up in rooms with Jeffrey Epstein.
That is not a coincidence. It is, rather, a very sad diagnosis of a very sad pathology.
The same absence of interior life that drives the accumulation drives everything else. The yacht is not enough. The island is not enough. The political influence is not enough. There is a hunger there that no external thing can satisfy, because the hunger is not for anything external. It is the hunger of a person who has never learned — who has been actively rewarded, their entire life, for never learning — that the only things worth having are the things that cannot be bought.
I do not envy these people. I left their world because I could not stay in it and remain who I am. That choice had costs. I have paid them without regret.
The republic has costs too. The question is whether enough of us are still willing to pay them.
I'm not sure the leftist that you describe in this piece actually exists. The idea that leftists are angry at the rich because they are jealous of the wealthy is a strawman put up by the wealthy as a way to dismiss their political rivals. We on the left are ALL liberals in this sense. The distinction between leftist and liberal is one between an imagined foe and a real one.
Hoarding is a mental illness. The compulsion to hoard, whether trash, clothes, etc - or resources such as money, land, wealth - when you clearly have enough TO THE DETRIMENT OF OTHERS ... This type of hoarding illness must be addressed.