The Dragons Ate Your Lunch

Craig DalzellOne of the arguments in favour of billionaires is that while they are wealthy beyond any possible realistic need, they in turn generate even more wealth by creating and supporting jobs. They might take a share of the production generated by you, their workers, but you wouldn’t be able to generate that production without the risk they took in employing you and providing you with the tools, the capital, that you need to do that job.What if it wasn’t true?This isn’t even going to be the classic Marxist reversal of that argument (that's a column for Rory to write at some point), which is to say that the owner of the means of production should be the workers themselves and that we’d all benefit if we all owned a stake in that capital rather than merely being an exploited and replaceable means of making the GDP line go up. I’m saying that we now have evidence that the capitalist argument that billionaires grow the economy and that benefits the rest of us fails on its own merits.This week Oxfam produced a report called “Takers not Makers” that goes through, in great detail, about how billionaires around the global extract wealth in a process that is nothing less than neo-colonialism. The difference between this and the old version is that the extraction doesn’t just take place in the Global South but here too.According to the report, the collective wealth of billionaires based in the UK rose by £35 million a day in 2024 with those 57 of the very wealthiest (including the four new entries into the wealth dragon club) which implies a collective wealth increase of around £12.8 billion.The Oxfam report goes into great detail about how much of global billionaire wealth is extracted from the Global South but that £12.8 billion figure caught my eye specifically because I had been recently looking at ONS figures on the total GDP (i.e. the total wealth) of the UK. We don’t have the full data for all of 2024 yet but from what we have, the UK’s economy grew between September 2023 and September 2024 by £7.1 billion. As almost any economist will be able to tell you, £12.8 billion is more than £7.1 billion.So the question is, if it wasn’t for the obscene wealth increases the dragons hoarded, would UK GDP have gone down? Or, in other words, have the billionaires extracted our wealth into themselves as well?It’s no wonder that the current economy is struggling in circumstances like that. Remember that according to the Sunday Times Rich List many of those billionaires aren’t actually productive capitalists at all. They’re rent seekers. They own vast property portfolios, land empires or financial firms. We’ve created an economy where your wage – already suppressed to the benefit of the billionaires who own the company who own your company – is increasingly siphoned off in rent and energy bills before you get a chance to spend it on anything else. Then the politicians wonder why we aren’t shopping or eating out as much – it turns out it’s pretty difficult to run a perpetually growing consumer economy after you’ve crushed the spending power of all of the consumers.Or if we are still consuming, we’re being forced to make worse choices about how we do it. The BBC published an article this week about the rise of Shein and other Chinese mass-budget goods apps and especially on how they keep their prices down by breaching even China’s relatively lax workers’ rights laws (with allegations of even breaches including the use of forced and child labour). The article is framed around how consumers are still buying from the app despite knowing about the abuses committed to create their cheap clothes and it’s revealing that the people asked aren’t themselves uncaring monsters but say things like “I tried to shop more ethically, but it was too expensive”.That’s the real price of the billionaire extractive economy we’re forced to participate in. Supporters of the system say that it’s because of consumer choice in a free market but it turns out that none of those words are true. It’s not a market (because of monopolies and price-fixing cartels), it’s not free (because of billionaires lobbying politicians for their own benefit such as Trump’s new cabinet of oligarchs or Starmer replacing the Competition Watchdog with a former Amazon boss). And we don’t have a choice because the billionaires force us to "choose" between spending all of our money on rent and energy and dumping the unpaid costs of crap consumerism on the Commons, or doing the same but more so.The price we pay is crap housing, crap clothes and the knowledge that we’re hurting people and the environment in the process. And then we get blamed for making that “choice” while also being told that doing anything else is “too radical”.We know what the something else would be though. It’s a world of libraries, not shops, where we borrow high quality clothes for that night out instead of buying something made by a slave half a world away that we’ll throw away next week. It’s one where our house is warm without paying through our teeth to make it so. It’s one where an economy is measured by how well we are, not how well off 57 billionaires are. It’s one where Scotland is part of a global network of countries pushing in that direction and directly against the trade sanctions of the Trump regime instead of throwing away every principle we have just to be allowed to export another crate of salmon farmed at a horrific unpaid price to our own local seas.If that’s a world too radical then I’ll issue a challenge. Let’s build it. Let’s try it out for a while. And once we have, I’ll get you to convince me that we should transition back to the current economy instead.