Cancelling billionaires
Commentary on the book Cancelling billionaires before they cancel us by Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks, Dundurn Press, Toronto, 1926 – a great title that totally misrepresents the content.
Around the world, millions of people are suffering as a result of the attempts of the billionaires, the 0.01% of the world’s population, to suck up increasing proportions of the wealth produced by labour each year in the world while ruthlessly pursuing the aim of monopolising, even at the expense of each other, all the world’s natural resources, including minerals, combustibles and water, in order to shore up their financial system that rests to a dangerous extent on fictitious capital. All the billionaires are terrified of being left penniless when the music stops and the exposure of the fictitious nature of much of their huge wealth that is the basis of all their power, brings the whole house of cards tumbling down. The people who suffer most are the people of the Middle East and Africa whose natural resources imperialist financial interests desperately need to lock up in their portfolios. The fight for these involves mobilising armed gangs, the murder and displacement of innocent civilians including genocide, denying all access to a secure and productive life to millions of people. Of course, people and progressive governments fight back, but it can only be at tremendous cost – and sometimes, as in Syria, they lose.
The misery, however, is not confined to countries that have become theatres of war. Throughout the world, people are rising up in protest at the downward pressure on their living standards. We have been seeing millions take to the streets in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Albania, India, etc., in protest at sinking living standards brought about by the insistence of the financial oligarchy on squeezing out for themselves an ever increasing proportion of the world’s wealth.
All of this, one would have thought, would be of great relevance to authors seeking to cancel the billionaires before they cancel us, but there is no mention of the horrors of war blighting so much of the world at this time. Instead the whole thesis of the book is that we should tax the wealth of the rich (those with assets valued at over $250 million at a rate of 1%, rising to 8% for the biggest mega billionaires), which would comfortably put the lucky governments of the countries where these moneybags are based in funds to provide a proper welfare system, including high quality healthcare and education, to its whole population. The book turns out to be simply a polemic against the low-taxation agenda of various US governments – an agenda that attracts votes because most of the electorate imagines they would be better off if they didn’t have to pay so much tax. It is hard to assess the value of social services lost to austerity.
Much statistical evidence is produced to show that high tax countries have higher standards of education, higher life expectancy, higher scores on happiness indexes, etc. In a nutshell, governments should aim at being more like … Finland!
While we are happy for the Finnish people that they are doing so well, a brief look at their governments’ track record hardly suggests that they are in the business of alleviating the suffering that the masses of the world are undergoing:
• Total military assistance provided by Finland to the Ukrainian fascist regime to fight imperialism’s war against Russia: $3.6 billion;
• The Finnish government has designated Iran as an espionage threat to Finland (!) and has backed European Union efforts to designate the IRGC (Iran’s Islamic revolutionary army) as a ‘terrorist organisation’. The one saving grace is that it opposes Nato involvement in the war against Iran.
• It also theoretically opposes the Israeli ground offensive in Gaza but it is only too happy to deepen ‘defence’ industry cooperation with Israel, to which it supplies ‘military solutions’. Finland has some 14,000 people directly employed in arms manufacture, supporting some 56,000 others in supply chains and services dependent on arms manufacture. It is hoping to more than double those employed in arms manufacture within a few years.
Maybe Finnish imperialism is not as lugubrious as US imperialism, but it’s certainly not a progressive force by any stretch of the imagination. Countries becoming more like Finland is hardly a route to cancelling billionaires!
Assuming it were even possible to force the billionaires to pay the taxes being suggested (itself an absurdity), we assume this would only benefit the countries where they are based, i.e., overwhelmingly imperialist countries, and would do nothing at all to relieve the superexploited distress of the oppressed countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America – debt slave countries, reeling under the weight of imperialist debt charges, and dependent on further loans from imperialism even to manage essential day to day expenditure. In other words, the whole thesis of this book is excruciatingly awful.
Getting the billionaires to cough up
Talking about getting the billionaires even to pay this suggested tax, which as the book says, involves amounts that are insignificant to the billionaires, is something that is just not going to happen any time soon! In April 2025 the Paris School of Economics held a conference on Taxing Billionaires, attracting 200 economists, legal experts and policy makers from around the world, all agreeing that there should be a global minimum tax on the richest billionaires of 2% annually, aiming to raise $250 billion a year globally. Influenced by the likes of Thomas Piketty, looking for ways to get capitalism to deliver wellbeing to the masses in the interests of its continued existence, the conference was deemed a resounding success. But to the surprise of its participants, their brilliant solution was nowhere adopted. Their suggestions briefly graced the agendas of the rich and powerful and their subject governments (big success!) but got absolutely nowhere. Democratic Party ‘lefties’, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, proposed such a wealth tax, but the proposal was soon forgotten. Even Biden contemplated the idea, but it was firmly blocked. And of course for this wealth tax to succeed, it needs to apply everywhere in order to prevent billionaires moving out of its jurisdiction. From the start both the US and Canada made it clear it would have nothing to do with it. The authors of the book themselves complain “… financial titans have collective resources in the range of US$ 16 trillion – more than the GDP of most of the world’s nations – and they resolutely use those resources to compel governments to deliver policies that facilitate the continual growth of their wealth”. There’s no more to be said. That is exactly why your thesis is dead in the water. Setting out to get billionaires to pay taxes is like trying to catch birds by the Simple Simon method of pouring salt on their tails.
The book as a source of useful information
Nevertheless, the book does contain some extremely useful information which is worth having if you are not too squeamish about wading through inanity. It is useful in documenting the extent to which the billionaires are exponentially increasing their seizure of the world’s production; it also documents their underhand opposition to taking measures to contain global warming; on how unconscionable billionaires enriched themselves shamelessly during the Covid pandemic; and it is also useful on the question of how the news media are being hoovered up by vulture funds and becoming even less independent and objective than they have ever been, while underfunded to do the investigative research that at one time they might have undertaken. It is scathing about private charitable foundations which it exposes as a method whereby the billionaires retain control of assets without technically owning them any longer, while at the same time getting tax breaks that deprive governments of funds that they could almost certainly put to better use than the charitable foundations do (which is often nothing at all).
On the question of the exponentially growing wealth of the billionaires, it is worth commenting in this article.
The great enrichment of the billionaires
The authors assert that “those who make up the global top 1% of wealth holders have managed to capture about half of all the wealth created between 2012 and 2023”.
They go on to inform us that in 1987 Forbes identified 140 billionaires. By 2025 the number was 3,028, but more important is the growth in the sheer volume of their wealth. In 1987 the 140 billionaires owned assets to the value of $295 billion between them. Today’s 3,028 have $16.1 trillion! The last 5 years have been the worst for seeing the billionaires hoovering up increasing percentages of the wealth being produced in the world.
In 2020 Bezos was the only billionaire whose wealth exceeded $100 billion. By 2025 there were 15, of whom three are worth over $200 billion.
In 1976 Paul Getty was the world richest man with $6 billion. After accounting for inflation, today’s richest person, Elon Musk, is worth 10 times more than Paul Getty was in 1976.
In 1987 the 140 billionaires had interests equal in value to 1.3% of global GDP, making ‘billionaire-land’ the 10th richest ‘country’ in the world. By 2025, however, the 3,028 billionaires had over 14% of projected world GDP, making 'billionaire-land' the 3rd richest ‘country’ in the world, after the US and China. At the current rate of increase in billionaire wealth, we can expect ‘billionaire-land’ to surpass China in 2032 and the US in 2038!
It is this phenomenon that enables one to understand why in rich imperialist countries like the US, the UK and France, there are so many homeless living in the street while social services crumble, with governments unable to maintain their former level of services in education, health, welfare or pensions despite continually rising levels of taxation. To the extent they try to do so in the hope of being re-elected they have to borrow from the moneybags at good rates of interest and it turns out that “in France, Italy and the UK — unlike in the US — the cost of government borrowing is higher than the economy’s nominal growth rate (which includes inflation)” (Niall Ferguson, ‘Who’s to blame for Europe’s riots? It’s not who the kids think’, The Times, 23 October 2026).
Yes, Mr Ferguson, but it’s not who you think either. You, like all too many others, put the blame on the excessive benefits lavished on the elderly. How often have we heard various pundits proclaiming in this country that Britain can’t afford the triple lock on state pensions while at the same time “Hundreds of people died in their homes during freezing temperatures last year, …
“Figures published for the first time by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) revealed that 2,500 deaths were linked to cold weather last winter, with the most deaths occurring in those over 85, and linked to a six-day cold snap in January 2025…" (Rebecca Thomas, ‘Freezing weather caused 2,500 UK deaths as pensioners struggle to heat homes’, The Independent, 18 February 2026).
The British state pension costs £146 billion a year to the payment of which all pensioners have been contributing their whole lives through their national insurance contributions. At the same time, last year the UK government had to pay £130 billion interest to the finance kings of the world for the privilege of borrowing some of the surplus wealth produced by society that they had appropriated – wealth that in a socialist society would belong to the state, not to private moneybags, and would not have to be borrowed! No tribute would have to be paid to the parasitic monsters who leech on the working masses of the world today. Is it pensions we can’t afford, or is it capitalism and its attendant billionaires?