Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: Billionaires

If You Want Companies To Behave Well You Have To Punish Decision Makers

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On August 25, 2026

22 Comments

Regular readers will know that China has been going after billionaires hard. So much so, in fact, that the number of billionaires is dropping in China.

Back after the financial collapse executives did very very well. They had been lying repeatedly, had engaged in wide-scale fraud and to the extent that there was any punishment it was fines on the companies involved.

Not only were the fines less than the companies had made, but even in the rare case that the company went bankrupt, the executives involved still got to keep all the money they had made. Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers wound up with a net worth of over 500 million — after his company was bankrupt.

The saying at the time when bad deals were made was IBGYBG. “I”ll be gone, you’ll be gone.”

So if you want to dis-incentivize bad executive behaviour, you have to really go after the execs. Here’s an example of China doing it the right way:

Notice that all his personal assets were seized. I’d also track down any family member he made rich and take that money away.

The only way to restrain capitalists is real prison sentences or execution (Vietnam is fond of executing corrupt execs) and taking their money, and thus power, away. The idea of corporations being used to shield decision makers and beneficiaries of illegal or evil behaviour from liability has to go away. Corporate personhood has to end, as well, or they have to be given the disadvantages of personhood. “Committed a serious crime? OK, the corporation is dissolved.”

Psychologically the most important thing here is for government officials to not identify with business leaders. Chinese CCP bureaucrats do not think of themselves as part of the same class as executives at companies. Organizationally there can be no revolving door between business and government. You can move from biz to government, but not vice versa. There can be no route for payoffs, including the old “I”ll hire or give your wife or kid a sweetheart deal.”

For most of Western history bureaucrats – aka. civil servants, were considered morally superior to businessmen, because they were working for the common good and by doing so earning less than they could if they were in the private sector. Business was what you did if you were morally inferior: a person who was concerned about yourself and not others.

That ethos produced some very competent and high powered government bureaucracies which were well respected, especially when combined with civil service examinations.

Government and business are two different things. There has to be some understanding between them, since government must regulate business, but government’s job is to make the people better off, not to make businesses richer.

When government operates this way it can control private enterprise so that markets work to the benefit of society. When it doesn’t, usually because it’s been corrupted by capitalists, it enables monopolies and oligopolies and exploitative practices and when there are crises, it bails out the rich, not the people.

All of this is well understood, really, it’s just that there’s a lot of money to pay for scummy intellectuals and journalists and experts to obscure the fact and pretend that there’s a trickle down effect or that what’s good for rich is good for society. (Hello Milton Friedman, you corrupt hack.)

Markets are a lot like nuclear energy. Great if you do it right, but if you don’t, it’ll blow up in your face, and the first rule is that the more money a capitalist has the more harshly they should be treated if they break the law or hurt the public. In China, that’s how it is. In the West, the rich skate and the poor go to prison for life or have their homes and savings and livelihood stolen.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

How Many Poor People Could Elon’s Trillion Lift Out Of Poverty?

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On June 30, 2026

25 Comments

Every once in a while a complete tool graces the comments and inspires a post with their sheer stupidity.

A trillion dollars is a million million dollars. Elon is worth over a trillion dollars. Let us say that all of that minus 20 million was taken from him and it added up to on trillion. He should be fine on just 20 million. (I sure would be. Perhaps your need to snort cocaine off naked models is greater than mine. Hey, I’m not judging.)

Now let’s take that trillion dollars and give it to the homeless. Supposedly there’s about 750K, but we’ll give the next poorest 250K money too.

That’s a million each.

“But Ian”, you cavil, “they must be irresponsible people because only bad, stupid drug addled bad bad bad people wind up homeless. They can’t manage a million dollars and they’ll just spend it all on drugs in a few months and be homeless again!”

That’s not actually what the evidence shows. When you just give homeless people money, they mostly use it on smart stuff, but let’s pretend it is and admit that some of them, like some of us, don’t make the best decisions.

We’ll buy them annuities. Assuming age 40, that’s about $3,500 a month. Age 60, over $5,000 a month.

So, Elon has enough money to make every homeless person not homeless. And he’s only one billionaire+.

All total America’s billionaires hold about 8.5 trillion dollars. If we knock them all down to 20 million we could give at least 8 million of the poorest people in America annuities that pay about $3,500 a month. (One does feel for the cocaine dealers and models in this scenario, however. Oh, an the mega-yacht builders. No progress without someone suffering, I guess.)

Now do “use the money corporations spend on stock buybacks.” Left for the reader, but… there won’t be any poor people left in America.

The fact is that the really rich people are, well, so amazingly rich that it boggles comprehension. They don’t have a lot of money. They don’t have a LOT of money. They don’t have a LOT of money.

They have a LOT of money.

OK?

And yes, they do get a lot of it by making other people poor, they receive massive public subsidies, blah, blah, blah. I’ve written a bunch of those articles and if you’re making the argument that they did it all on their own Atlas Shrugged’esque, you an idiot. A very useful idiot for the people with so much money.

(This proposal is illustrative, not expected and yes, if taken seriously it would cause a lot of economic re-balancing and lots of people would whine it wasn’t fair. It’s illustrative. Illustrative. Repeat after Ian, “illustrative”. It’d still be a better way of using the money than the AI bubble though.)

America has poor people because the people with money and power want it that way. The details of how it is done are complicated, but it really is that simple.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

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