Chuck Collins directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy studies. I confess I have a bias toward anyone who has the “common good” in their everyday vocabulary—it forms the basis of politics according to Thomas Aquinas, after all. It is another way of talking about fairness and justice and balance and sustainability.
It underscores community and solidarity, and ways to nurture it and keep it afloat and even thriving. The opposite of the “common good” is the individual good of the powerful few.
Collins has written a no-nonsense and to-the-point readable book without frills or detours, called Burned By Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet. I highly recommend it.
It helps name the shadow behind so much of the “dark money” and the inequities in America today—even much of the rage going on in our politics that demagogues are profiting from daily. In that way, it helps explain the success of the MAGA world that has supported its leader against all rational thinking, because this book lays out the stark turn that the American economy took, beginning about 40 years ago.
Consider just this one statistic: Between 1980 and 2024, the number of billionaires in the United States has increased 50 times, from 15 to more than 800. A billion dollars is one thousand million dollars, a billionaire is a millionaire 1,000 times over (and many times that when a billionaire is a billionaire many times over).
This book is not about individual billionaires as such—as the author puts it, “the focus here is not on wealthy individuals, there are both scoundrels and generous souls among the lot.” (I think of Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker among the latter.) The book is about the system, and what it means when a society moves from 15 billionaires to 800 in a generation.
How did this happen? What are the consequences? How are we all affected? How much does this explain the despair and fear and consequent outrage that so mark the spirit of our times and politics, and that demagogues take advantage of? It is about policy failure.
As Collins puts it, an economy that is growing billionaires at all, much less at their current rate of increase, is not a sign of prosperity but of policy failure resulting in a systemic problem with hugely consequential and negative impacts for society.
The Table of Contents of the Book lays out the areas that are seriously affected by this “policy failure.” Part Two is titled “The Billionaire Burn: How the Wealth of a Few Impoverishes the Many,” and is broken down into the following chapters:
- Billionaires are Trashing the Planet
- Billionaires are making you pay higher taxes
- Billionaires are wrecking the housing market
- Billionaires are supercharging the racial economic divide
- Billionaires are bad for your health
- Billionaires are stealing your vote and voice Four other ways the billionaires are messing with your life
Collins says we need “rule changes that rewire capitalism for shared prosperity for all rather than spoils for the few.” It is time to “unrig the rules that benefit billionaires.” He calls it a “form of modern-day idolatry” to exalt billionaires, and to turn over to them ever more wealth and power and media control and political leverage. It offers recommended actions to bring this about.
Thank you, Chuck Collins, for this clear and concise foray into the causes of our country’s demise today, and for your insights into how to stand up to the challenge.
* Chuck Collins, Burned By Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet, pp. 28, 3, 196.
To read the transcript of Matthew Fox’s video meditation, click HERE.
Banner Image: In 1900, in the pages of Puck magazine, cartoonist Udo J. Keppler asked why the obscenely rich “can’t be content with the half they make honestly?” Wikimedia Commons.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you also see the exalting of billionaires and turning over ever more wealth and power, media and political leverage to them, as a modern day idolatry?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society.
Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ.
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice.
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality.
“Warriors for Ecological and Economic Justice,” in Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Times.
Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision For a New Generation.
5 thoughts on “Does America (and the Earth) Have a Billionaire Problem?”
YES?!!! Great DM Matthew and great recommendation of Chuck Collins’ book, “Burned by Billionaires.” Like you say, Collins reviews the history and the dangers of excessive capitalism, especially the last forty years with the explosive growth of billionaires in the US, and its consequent creation of social inequalities due to the addiction/greed to material wealth and power. It’s so sad to realize that the sins of duality, patriarchal materialistic values, many forms of racism, excessive capitalism… are destroying Sacred Mother Earth/Her living creatures/graceful abundance and the possibilities of creating more just/humane/compassionate societies in our interconnected/interdependent Sacred Spiritual World. These are indeed continued spiritual problems/challenges in Our personal/communal evolution towards Loving Diverse ONENESS of OUR COMPASSIONATE COSMIC CHRIST~BUDDHA CONSCIOUSNESS in the Sacred Process/Flow of the ETERNAL PRESENT MOMENT….
You could say that, but just as Nature abhors a Vacuum, it cannot survive. It will be turned against either by outside or inside forces. It cannot last; albeit abhorent while it lasts.
One possible mem:
Billionaires are cancers on the commonwealth.
Excellent meditation today. Makes me ask, what if CBS had the common good of society in mind and decided to interview Chuck Collins on 60 Minutes?
It is idolatry, and so is the false dogma that birthed it. I grew up in Arizona where in our senior year, we all had to take one semester of American Government and one semester of Economics. We studied democracy and laws against monopolies. I took these studies to heart.
Today, Amazon (owned by Jeff Bezos) controls nearly 40% of the U.S. e-commerce market. Verizon has a cell phone market share of between 22.89% and 35.6%. The last time a major monopoly was broken up in the United States was in 1984. Also in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan introduced the idea of “trickle-down economics” with the Economic Recovery Tax Act.
The result? Matthew, as you say: “Between 1980 and 2024, the number of billionaires in the United States has increased 50 times, from 15 to more than 800. A billion dollars is one thousand million dollars, a billionaire is a millionaire 1,000 times over.”