Zohran Mamdani proves we must abolish billionaires!
One of America's most famous Southern politicians would agree with us.
As a democratic socialist, Zohran Mamdani shares my opinion on one key point: Billionaires should not exist!
From an economic perspective, billionaires are the economic equivalent of Mr. Creosote, the monstrously obese restaurant patron played by Terry Jones in the 1983 sketch comedy film “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.” The conceit of Mr. Creosote’s scene is that he orders inordinate quantities of food which he continues to consume even as his body violently rejects it, vomiting up wave after wave of ejecta. Finally, after the maître d’ gives him a “wafer-thin” mint, he explodes, dousing his fellow hapless restaurant patrons in his own guts.
Similarly, the world’s 3,028 billionaires (including 902 in the U.S.) are consuming far more of the world’s resources than they need or can sustainably support. When they inevitably explode, they will survive (much as Creosote improbably seems to persist), but we will be left with the repulsive conditions they leave behind — poverty, poor health, political disintegration and ecological destruction.
Democratic socialists like Mamdani and I argue that for all of these reasons, billionaires should not exist. We were preceded in this position by a politician as all-American as they come, a Southern good ol’ boy who ruled the deep fried state of Louisiana with an iron fist as a governor and senator from 1928 to 1935: Huey Long
Running for president in the 1936 election cycle as a Democratic challenger to incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Long advocated a “Share Our Wealth” program. It held that personal fortunes should be capped at $50 million ($950 million in 2025), which he later reduced to $5 million - $8 million ($95 million to $152 million in 2025). In addition to confiscating fortunes in excess of these figures, Long would have limited annual incomes to $1 million ($19 million in 2025) and inheritances to $5 million ($95 million in 2025).
These policies would have been a self-evident good, given that they would eliminate the unfair advantages from which the billionaires and other super-rich benefit by sheer virtue of their disproportionate wealth. Yet Long would have spread this wealth in important and productive ways, including providing a guaranteed annual income of one-third the national average, or $2,000 in 1935 ($38,000 in 2025); old-age pensions for everyone older 60; free veterans benefits and healthcare; free college education and vocational training; and mandating a four-week vacation and 30-hour work week.
Long was assassinated before he could contest a single primary against Roosevelt, but his message remains tragically relevant. More than 90 years have passed since Long’s death, but his proposals are even more urgently necessary. Between 2024 and 2025, the world’s handful of billionaires — just over 3,000 out of a human population of more than 8 billion — added $2 trillion to their collective wealth, increasing their total net work to $16.1 trillion. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, just received a $1 trillion pay package from the shareholders of his biggest company, Tesla.
The Creosotes are getting bigger and bigger. Politicians like Mamdani are therefore being elected. Even Americans who haven’t seen the Mr. Creosote sketch, or picked up on its social commentary, understand as I do that our lives will be quite ugly if this behemoth is allowed to continue grotesquely expanding at our collective expense.
Back Seat Socialism
Back Seat Socialism is a column by Matthew Rozsa, who has been a professional journalist for more than 13 years. Currently, he is writing a book for Beacon Press, “Neurosocialism,” which argues that autistic people like the author struggle under capitalism, and explains how neurosocialism - the distinct anticapitalist perspective one develops by living as a neurodiverse individual - can be an important organizing principle for the left.