If he was alive today, what would Adam Smith make of Jeff Bezos’s lobbying for ever-more government subsidies, or about government bailouts in the Great Recession that saved America’s rich while millions lost their homes, or about Peter Thiel’s admission that “Monopolists lie to protect themselves”? I think Smith would say: I told you so. Smith was scathingly critical of the wealthy’s disproportionate power over government policymaking. He complained about the tendency of the rich to shirk tax obligations, unfairly passing tax burdens on to poor workers. He heaped scorn on government bailouts of the East India Company. He thought dirty money in politics was akin to bribery, and that it undermined the duty to govern impartiality. He wasn’t alone.
The reality is that the historical case for abolishing billionaire privileges has a long heritage, stretching to enlightenment thinkers and the revolutionaries they inspired, including countless enslaved and working-class people in forgotten graves.
Thomas Paine, the 18th-century British radical whose writing helped to spur the American Revolution, called for the establishment of a wealth fund, financed by taxes on property, that would give every woman and man a lump sum of money in both early adulthood and again in old age. Today, basic income policy proposals revive this idea.
Feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft, a peer of Smith and Paine, condemned British laws that favoured the rich over the poor. Smith agreed. Wollstonecraft sparred in writing with her contemporary Edmund Burke, criticizing his claim that life in the late 18th century was “better” than ever, and his insistence that struggling workers should defer to the hierarchy of the feudal age..https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/14/the-historical-case-for-abolishing-billionaires
- Anand Giridharadas on elite do-gooding: 'Many of my friends are drunk on dangerous BS'
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/18/anand-giridharadas-author-aspen-wealthy-elite
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