O My America — The Billionaires

by Lawrence Bush When my son, now 24, was about 12 years old, we spent the first half hour of a car trip trying to spend a billion dollars. After assembling our fleet of luxury cars, our string of international homes, our recording studio stuffed with vintage guitars, our yacht, our helicopter, and our charitable foundation, we ran out of steam, with over half a billion to spare. We hadn’t the imagination to spend a billion dollars, and got bored trying. So why are they doing what they’re doing to do to us and our country, those rich men at the top of the world? How can they agree to have their government (it’s not my government, I don’t pick the candidates) laying off tens of thousands of teachers, city workers, and others to balance the budgets instead of raising taxes by a percent or two on their impossibly inflated incomes? How can they justify having billions and billions and billions when the rest of us are rolling our quarters? How can they wallow in impossible-to-spend fortunes while making millions of us fret about whether or not we’ll receive Social Security? Wealth is a collective product. That’s a fundamental teaching of Judaism and a fundamental reality principle of human life. None of us creates the natural resources from which wealth is manufactured, and none of us manufactures it without the centuries of know-how and technology and infrastructure and cooperation that make it possible. Economics are social, therefore wealth should be reasonably shared. I’m not talking about abolishing private property or abolishing all pay scale differentials or any such utopian moves. But anyone who personally possesses a billion dollars and is not, at least, dedicated wholeheartedly to service and human betterment is living with a broken moral compass, a narcissistic sense of self, and, more than likely, blood on their hands.