If you are a billionaire, you carry one of the most prestigious titles in the business world. But for the whole world, you represent a major problem because it is an unfair, inefficient and dangerous distribution of the Earth’s resources to allocate trillions of dollars to a handful of individuals when a billion people have to survive on less than $2 a day.
If you’re a billionaire who doesn’t pay your fair share of taxes, that’s even worse. Because of you, we go back centuries to a time before the French Revolution when it was legal for lords not to pay taxes. We also return to the period before the Boston Tea Party, when American settlers, angry with England, refused “taxation without political representation”. In fact, the situation is probably more frightening today because many of you directly or indirectly command political power, which results in you enjoying “political super-representation without taxation”.
We are even at risk of returning to the age of slavery because in our regimes, where powers must be balanced between individuals, markets and the state, if a handful of billionaires do not pay their fair share of taxes and benefit from political super-representation, what role does the population in general have, which does not have such influence and must bear the loss of earnings resulting from such inequity?
Finally, if you are a billionaire who does not pay his fair share of taxes, the multinational you founded does not either, and you claim to be a great philanthropist at the head of a so-called charitable foundation , financed with taxpayers’ money, is the worst of all.
You and your ilk are fiscal parasites and hypocrites who present themselves as benefactors when in reality it is the people who do your good.
Shouldn’t you be ashamed of that?
When I think that you force people to work for salaries that are one hundred and sometimes two hundred thousand times lower than the wealth that you accumulate with your multinationals, that you often pay less tax than them and then you force you to beg from your supposedly charitable foundations in order to survive.
When I think that during the first three months of the pandemic, when people were dying without anyone knowing the virus that was hitting us and when there was still no vaccine, the wealthiest among you were making going out into the public square to announce how happy you were to do your part to help when in reality you were giving away a hefty 0.1% of your wealth.
When I think that you are the worst polluters with your private jets, your space travels and your shameless consumption. This planet is our home too.
As 2023 dawns, I wholeheartedly hope that our politicians quickly find the courage to reform these regimes that allow you to accumulate that excess wealth and escape your fair share of taxes. The needs are pressing and change cannot wait.
Ultimately, we will all close the books of life stripped of our possessions. Are all those billions really worth it? Come down from your ivory towers and join us on the construction site of this new, fairer world capable of meeting the challenges of the 21st century.e century.