Billionaires Don't Create Jobs

I honestly can’t believe I still have to say this in 2022.

Billionaires don’t create jobs.

They literally do the exact opposite.

It’s unfathomable that people still delude themselves into thinking otherwise.

Refusing to look at the facts.

Refusing to do basic math.

Refusing to use their brains.

Let me arm you up with some basic understanding so the next time someone defends billionaires as “job creators,” you can slap them in the face with the loving hand of reality.

Billionaire corporations have the power to destroy their competition

Amazon now has nearly 1.5 million employees (adding almost half a million during the pandemic), but most of them are treated like peasant-robot-dogs who endure higher injury rates than similar companies.

This many employees might sound impressive, but how many total jobs has the economy lost because of them? In one sector alone, Amazon’s debt-funded predatory pricing killed thousands of bookstores, not only eliminating thousands of meaningful local jobs but also killing off cultural institutions that brought communities together.

And that’s just books. It’s done the same to retail, including mom and pop shops, high street boutiques, and long-loved chains, and dozens of other industries it’s beginning to dominate, including digital advertising, citizen surveillance, and governmental spyware. (Just wait until it gets into drugs and destroys CVS, Walgreens, and Rite-Aid.)

Amazon’s black hole has swallowed more than a hundred companies to date, and when monopolies grow larger through acquisitions instead of real in-house innovation, massive layoffs are announced shortly thereafter as the companies merge.

(It is telling that stock prices jump whenever layoffs are announced — once again proving that corporations are pro-profit and anti-human.)

Billionaire corporations have the power to abuse their workers

Companies like Amazon and Walmart and Uber invest hundreds of millions of dollars each year to smash unions, undermine workers’ rights and safety, slash benefits, and keep employee pay far lower than it would be if workers had real power.

When workers make less money, they have less money to spend on consumer goods. This means fewer jobs in the overall economy, because all that should-be worker money just sits in the offshore accounts of corporations until they invest it in undermining more workers, and the cycle repeats itself.

Billionaire corporations have the power to abuse their suppliers

There is no such thing as “economies of scale.”

There’s just monopsony power, where one buyer has so much power they can bully suppliers into giving them better deals, usually before forcing them into bankruptcy or acquiring them at firesale prices.

When suppliers have to cut costs because they’re being choked out, they have to lay people off. The monopoly gets a cheaper bulk price on goods, but the economy sheds jobs because of it.

Billionaire corporations have the power to undermine and overrule democracy

It should be illegal for corporations to lobby politicians because they are not human, but multinationals constantly lobby-bribe politicians to get public laws changed for their private benefit.

Airbnb, for instance, has at least 13 lobbying firms hammering on Congress to let them keep turning residential family homes into full-time commercial hotels, and has funded more than 400 fake grassroots organizations.

Amazon, for its part, is currently waging a secret war against citizen privacy, killing more than three dozen bills across 25 states in recent years.

When billionaire corporations change laws in their favor, it inevitably ends up meaning fewer workers, with fewer wages in their pockets. Without more people spending more money, the economy loses jobs.

Billionaire corporations have the power to take jobs overseas

It’s obvious to us now: The “free trade” gospel was just a ruse by billionaire corporations to dodge safety standards, worker’s rights, and minimum wages, and exploit overseas labor while still selling to developed countries.

Car manufacturers were the first to head to Mexico, and clothing manufacturers quickly followed. Today, garbage predator companies like Nike, Apple, Coke, and hundreds of other companies are so committed to not hiring Americans that they all produce products made with straight-up slave labor.

(In case you’re wondering, that list also includes Google, BMW, GM, Mercedes, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony, Microsoft, Adidas, Abercrombie & Fitch, Calvin Klein, Lacoste, HP, Land Rover, Nintendo, Oculus, Victoria’s Secret, and Volkswagen.)

Billionaire corporations have the power to evade taxation

Multinational tax evasion has reached unfathomable heights.

I hope you’re ready, because this stat will blow your mind:

Over half of all US corporate profits are now booked in tax havens.

That means America’s largest companies are stealing hundreds of billions of dollars in owed taxation to help finance the costs of the civilization from which they extract trillions in revenue.

Corporate tax evasion means fewer teachers. Fewer nurses. Fewer infrastructure maintenance workers. Fewer firefighters. Fewer emergency services.

It means fewer commons-serving jobs.

Billionaire corporations have the power to hoard money

Right now, a collection of predator corporations including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Berkshire Hathaway are sitting on more than a trillion dollars in cash, ready to deploy and eat up the markets as soon as they crash.

This will likely cause the biggest single-year transfer of assets from the poor to the rich in world history.

When the dust settled, Potter will own everything.

Billionaire corporations have the power to invest in joblessness

According to research out of MIT, automation is responsible for more than half of all economic disparity in the past forty years.

In other words, while hundreds of millions of people lose their jobs to automation, AI, machine learning, and robotics, billionaires are pocketing all of the profits.

Your local organic farmer hires humans because she doesn’t have the capital to buy a squad of carrot-picking drones. This is a very good thing because all technological innovation isn’t real progress if part of your definition of human flourishing includes good-paying jobs for human beings.

Billionaire corporations have the power to abuse their customers

It’s important to remember that jobs aren’t the only thing that suffers when massive corporations are allowed to devour an economy.

When gigantic multinationals gain a big enough market share, they can start screwing their customers, too.

You think price inflation is bad?

1. You’re simultaneously getting hammered by shrinkflation, which is when companies make their products smaller. As a teenager, I used to work as a baker at Tim Horton’s, and when they introduced visibly smaller donuts, they trained us with a corporate-supplied script on how to lie to customers. (For the record, I refused and told people the truth when they complained.) Shrinkflation is everywhere: My grocery store sells eggs in ten packs instead of a dozen. Cereal boxes are smaller. Candy bars are smaller. The list is massive.

2. Then there’s bulkflation. You used to be able to buy family-sized versions of everything. Right now, we’re witnessing a rapid transition from bulk quantities to single-serving versions, often touted as “value meal packs.” This is just another example of maximizing profits instead of providing real value.

3. Then there’s qualityflation. One of my favorite subreddits is r/BuyItForLife, which reminds me that goods like clothing and appliances and technology were once manufactured to last a human lifetime, but are now purposefully designed to break down quickly and be irreparable — it’s called planned obsolescence, and some countries are trying to make it illegal.

But the worst trend in customer-gouging definitely goes to the new and unbelievably dangerous business model called Subscription Serfdom.

Instead of allowing customers to purchase goods outright, corporations put a monopoly on their products and just rent them to their customers instead. My wife could once purchase the Adobe suite for around $500 — now it will cost her $40,000 in monthly fees over the course of her career. For the same crap. The product doesn’t provide any more value for the customer, it just extracts more wealth up to the monopolist.

Subscription Serfdom will become economically lethal to the working class when corporations partner with financial firms to securitize their products.

In other words, a mattress that once sold for $800 is worth $3600 if you can rent it to a pleb for $100/month on a three-year contract. Suddenly, no one can afford to buy anything outright, and a corporation has gained a dependent customer for life.

This, inevitably, will destroy an untold number of jobs, and more importantly, it will vaporize working-class wealth and drive us into corporate serfdom.

Newsflash: The contributor class does everything

How willfully ignorant can a person be of the contributions made by the working class?

Contributive workers are responsible for 100% of the wealth of society — first through their work, and just as importantly, through their consumer spending.

Here’s how a reader recently put it:

If you give a billionaire a million dollars, they just add it to the war chest to amass more power and destroy more jobs. Billionaires don’t create jobs, they concentrate them.

Let’s use our brains for a second.

Please think about this long and hard, friends.

Multi-centibillionaire Elon Musk would have literally zero dollars without:

1. A politically stable and taxpayer-funded infrastructure-rich nation in which to manufacture and sell his products

2. $10+ billion in subsidies from taxpayers

3. 70,000 contributors to do the actual work

4. Millions of value-creating consumers to buy the actual products

“Oh, but what about the initial capital to start companies?”

Great question.

Investor-class capital is simply previously-extracted worker wealth.

Wake up, America.

Billionaires are extractors, not contributors.

They’re here to take your wealth and rights and not give anything back.

Let’s say we eliminated all legal limiters and let Amazon run roughshod in a rules-free-market. They would eventually own everything on earth. Now ask your billionaire sycophant friends: If one corporation ran the global economy, would there be more or fewer jobs than today?

The answer is obvious: There would be significantly less employment, less freedom, more corporate dependence, and less widespread wealth.

We need a fair-fight economy

We make fighters fight in their own weight class for a reason.

Heavyweights don’t fight featherweights because then it’s no longer a game — it’s a criminal offense.

It’s hard to fathom the scale of the companies that now run our world.

If you do the math, a trillion-dollar multinational corporation like Amazon versus a million-dollar local business is like a six-foot amateur boxer fighting against someone six million feet tall.

Or another way: American median net worth is $121,760, but against a $10-trillion monopoly like Blackrock, it’s like a 180-pound human being fighting an eternal robot weighing 14.7 billion pounds. (Or fighting 82 million people at the same time.)

I know these are very strange analogies, but it’s impossible to understand the size of scale that these monsters operate on.

We need a fair-fight economy.

The fix: No more billionaire corporations

Planet Earth doesn’t need billionaires and it doesn’t need multinational monopolies.

Why is this so hard to understand?

We need to stop corporations before they cross the Rubicon:

Nothing too big to fail.

Nothing too big to destroy their competition.

Nothing too big to undermine democracy.

Nothing too big to bully suppliers.

Nothing too big to ragdoll employees.

Nothing too big to take jobs overseas.

Nothing too big to evade taxation.

Nothing too big to enslave consumers.

What is our goal?

The goal for billionaires is economic “efficiency.”

By that, they mean, “whatever is most efficient to drive dollars into my pockets.”

In other words: Destroying other businesses, layoffs, shipping jobs overseas, evading taxes, undermining democracy, and automating away the workforce.

But this narrow definition of efficiency is antithetical to the effective society we’re trying to build.

We want more jobs, more competition, more suppliers, more businesses, more selection, more culture, more freedom, more tax dollars, more consumer power, more democracy.

And all that requires less money in billionaire pockets.

Really think it through, friends. It is in every corporation’s best interest to pay people as little as possible and to employ as few people as possible. The bigger the company, the greater the ability to do just that.

Look, if our goal is to have a handful of billionaires own and control the entire earth’s resources while billions of families struggle under corporate serfdom and wage slavery, battling ever harder to keep a job and roof over their heads, then we are absolutely on the right track.

But if our aim is full employment where workers receive the lion’s share of the value they create, with a debt-free roof over their heads and an equal say in the nation in which they live, then we need to turn around immediately.

Stop voting for political parties that are sponsored by these monsters.Stop buying from corporations that have crossed the Rubicon.Tell everyone you know to do the same.