A new fashion dominates polite progressive politics: denouncing the billionaire. The political and media establishment now routinely laments rising inequality, yet their critique never dares to name the system that produces it. Their solution—their rallying cry—is as bold as a wet leaf: “tax the billionaires.”
At first glance, the demand sounds radical. It recognises that the grotesque wealth hoarded by a tiny elite is socially obscene. It gestures toward justice. But beneath this fury lies a deeper confusion—a deliberate evasion. The billionaire is not a moral aberration to be corrected by a kinder tax code. The billionaire is the logical outcome of capitalism: the personified expression of private property, unequal exchange, imperial extraction, and the daily appropriation of surplus value from the global working class.
No billionaire earns their wealth. At median earnings in Ireland, you would have to work over twenty thousand years to accumulate a billion euro. This calculation is a fantasy, of course, as workers do not get to pour their full salary into a vault; they must pay to survive. If we assume a modest, unrealistic savings rate of 10% after the costs of reproducing life, the journey to €1 billion takes over two hundred thousand years. The number is so absurd it becomes comic—and yet it reveals the simple truth: billionaire wealth is not earned income. It is ownership income: the power to extract value generated by others.
Despite this, many cling to the comforting belief that a small annual wealth tax—1%, 2%, perhaps 5%—could rein in inequality. They speak as if trimming a fraction off the top of accumulated assets would change the structure of society. They imagine that this time, capital will sit still, pay its share, and allow society to rebalance. It is a heroic faith in a class that has never in its history surrendered power voluntarily.
This modest ambition rests on a conceptual muddle. The “tax-the-rich” conversation often conflates income (a flow: wages, dividends) and wealth (a stock: shares, property, equity). Taxing income “more fairly” does not touch the mountain of assets from which class power is derived. Even wealth taxes, where they exist, leave the ownership of the means of production intact. They skim the top of the pile while leaving the pile—and the power it represents—exactly where it stands.
Nostalgia is sometimes invoked to give this illusion coherence. We are told that in the post-war United States, a top income tax rate above 90% created broad prosperity. This comforting myth dissolves under scrutiny. The 90% rate applied to personal income alone, was riddled with loopholes, and was tolerated by the American ruling class only during a period of absolute industrial dominance and secure profits. When profitability wavered and working-class militancy grew, the compromise was immediately torn up. High taxes did not tame capitalism; capitalism tolerated them only when its power was unchallenged.
This is the critical point: even when implemented, wealth taxes do not redistribute power. They can redistribute income, temporarily. But income is not command. Income is not control over production, investment, employment, or the future. Ownership is.
If taxation were enough to restrain capitalism, it would have worked by now. Instead, every social-democratic gain of the last century was tolerated only during moments of strong profitability or existential political threat—and was systematically reversed the moment conditions changed. The system evades, absorbs, and nullifies reforms unless the underlying property relations are transformed.
In Ireland, this contradiction is sharper still. The political class speaks of “tax fairness” while refusing to meaningfully tax corporate profits, the actual engine of billionaire wealth. Profits become dividends, share buybacks, and capital gains. The clearest way to tax the rich is to tax profits at the source—before they become private fortunes. But the Irish state cannot do this without destabilising its own FDI-dependent growth model. Our “success” is built on low corporate taxes and an open invitation for multinationals to book profits here. Any challenge to this model threatens the delicate architecture upon which our comprador bourgeoisie has built its legitimacy.
A state dependent on foreign capital cannot discipline it. It can only accommodate it.
This domestic bind sits atop a global structure that is even more devastating. The so-called wage gap between the Global North and South is in fact a deliberate system of enforced cheapness—imperialism in its modern form—upheld through trade rules, intellectual property regimes, and creditor power. This is the soil from which billionaires grow: the unpaid hours of billions, the looting of natural resources, the suppression of independent development.
The conclusion is unavoidable. The problem is not that taxation is too low. The problem is that ownership is private, and power flows from ownership. A wealth tax tweaks distributions within capitalism; socialism transforms the mode of production itself.
Tax the billionaires if you can—there is no reason to leave their hoards untouched—but do not mistake this for structural change. Without challenging the private ownership of the productive forces of society—housing, energy, land, and industry—the system will continue to manufacture billionaires at one pole and mass insecurity at the other. Redistribution without socialisation is merely crisis management.
Socialism is not the kinder administration of capitalism. It is the abolition of the social relation that makes billionaires possible. The issue is not redistribution. It is power—and power will shift only when ownership does.
