John Lestrange, the speaker in today’s video, is a historian, a museum educator, and an acrobat to boot. He’s also a accomplished author, with two books, both of them about representation of genocide, one in cartoons and the other in video games.
He’s also dubbed himself as The History Wizard on TikTok, talking about, well, history, and more recently about various class issues, such as the inherent unfairness of billionaire-acquired wealth.
Today he’s breaking down exactly why billionaires are evil - and it seems that there are no ifs, ands or buts about it.
More info: TikTok
John, or The History Wizard, took a video to explain why all billionaires are evil, explaining it with numbers and facts
Image credits: the_history_wizard
"This comment is asking if I could prove that all 2000 of the billionaires are evil people. Yeah, I can. It's not even very hard"
"So first, let's put a billion into perspective. 1 million seconds is about 12 days. 1 billion seconds is just under 32 years. Which means that if you earn $1 every single second and never spent any of it, it would take you about 32 years to earn a single billion dollars."
Image credits: thehistorywizard
"If you earned $5000 a day from the time that Columbus started his infamous voyage, it would take you about 527 years to earn a single billion dollars"
"And there are people out there with multiple billions of dollars. Based on that math, we can conclude that there's no ethical way to acquire a billion dollars because there is no physically possible way to earn that money solely through the value of your own labor, which means that in order to become a billionaire, you have to steal the labor value of thousands if not millions of people."
Image credits: thehistorywizard
"And we know that this is the case," Johnathan explains, giving an example
"And we know that this is the case because between 1979 and 2021, the average productivity, meaning the average amount of labor value produced by the workers, has increased by 64.6%. Meanwhile, the average wage of workers has only increased by about 17.3%. That's a difference of nearly 50% labor value. So, already billionaires are stealing 50% or more of their workers’ labor value so that it can sit around in investment funds and stock portfolios, providing nothing of value to society."
Image credits: thehistorywizard
"And when we start to take certain other things into account, it gets even worse"
"There are currently over 582,000 homeless people in the United States, many of which are children. And in the year 2020, there were more than 34 million food-insecure people in the United States. That's about 10% of the population that doesn't know where their next meal is going to come from."
Image credits: thehistorywizard
"Now, do you know how much it would cost to end homelessness in the United States?"
"According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, it would cost $20 billion to end homelessness in the United States. And there are currently 770 billionaires in the United States. Putting aside the fact that Elon Musk alone could end homelessness for half the cost of what he paid for Twitter, if we split it up evenly across all 770 of them, each of them would only have to pay out a lowly $26 million."
Image credits: thehistorywizard
"And yet, despite the ease with which they could end homelessness in the United States, billionaires are wasting their money..."
"...on vanity projects like dying in a sub at the bottom of the ocean and buying Twitter. There is no room for billionaires in an ethical society. They quite simply shouldn't exist."
Image credits: thehistorywizard
Watch the full video here:
The wealth in equality created by the rich, especially billionaires, is almost ungraspably wide
If you’re wondering about these two thousand billionaires that John and the comment are talking about, they’re likely referring to the 37th annual Forbes list of billionaires. There are 2640 of them on that list, with a total wealth of $12.2 trillion. To put that into perspective, the current US debt is over $32 trillion, so they have a bit more than a third of one of the world superpowers’ debt.
Talk about pocket change, huh?
Although 51% of them had less wealth than compared to the previous year in 2020, they “bounced back” with 660 new members and a $5.1 trillion increase in wealth. Both the dip and the spike could be attributed to the pandemic - while the 99% experienced a loss of income, the 10 richest saw their riches double.
Depending on how you calculate the exact numbers, John is correct. There are upwards of 700 billionaires in the US. In fact, the States is the country with the most billionaires worldwide. The following 4 places are taken up by China, India, Germany, and Russia. Although I bet that there will be some redistributions in Russia following their unjust war on Ukraine, as it seems there’s a proverbial “rats on a burning ship” situation in progress over there.
With so much wealth centralized in the States, it seems quite humorous, then, in the worst sense of the word, that there are so many societal problems over there. The Wizard has already mentioned homelessness and food insecurity, but another burning one is healthcare.
You hear about it all the time - people don’t call the ambulance, because they can’t pay for the “joyride”, they get price hikes for basic healthcare services, and even have to request itemized bills because they’d be getting scammed left and right. It’s part of a bigger problem, but some of that trillion-sized pie might alleviate the issue.
Let me tell you up front that things like this seem pretty much like fairy tales in Europe and other countries with far better coverage. I recently went under the knife myself, got an entire organ removed, took my time to recover, and did not pay even a single red cent.
Image credits: the_history_wizard
The list goes on and on: education, violence against LGBT people, racism, domestic violence… It doesn’t end. And I know what you’re saying, money won’t solve it all, but in the right place, it could do wonders.
But ranting about problems is far too easy. Let’s talk solutions! You hear people saying “eat the rich” but that’s just a slogan to rally behind. Put your fork away. I said put it away!
One of the things you can do is vote. It’s not as easy as it seems at first glance, as because, well, populism, among other things. You also have to do quite a lot more than due diligence to make sure your voice counts.
Read through your candidates’ policies thoroughly, both locally and nationally. Vote for things like increased and improved welfare budgets of all kinds and scaling taxes or fines, especially for the rich.
Another one is to unionize at workplaces. Union dues seem scary at first, but once you do some looking, you can find out what kind of benefits being in a union can give you. Increased wages, better working hours, and improved benefits are just a few of the things that unionizing can bring. Contact your regional representative and enquire what kind of options are available to you.
Most importantly, talk to your peers and family about improving things, and discuss how you can make things better in your community. It may seem like a lot, but sometimes you need to take things one day at a time, especially when you don’t have trillions in your checking account.
Image credits: cottonbro studio (not the actual photo)
For the coup de grâce of this article, Bored Panda managed to reach out to the wizard himself - John Lestrange.
In the comments of his videos, you can see some of the “but what if I become an -aire” arguments against scaling taxes for the rich. John thinks that these kinds of thoughts are straight-up silly.
“The current global population is roughly 8 billion people and there are currently 2,640 billionaires on the planet. That means that .00000033% of people have over a billion dollars.”
The odds of you becoming a billionaire, even a millionaire, are stacked so aggressively against you that you’re far closer to becoming homeless than ever being a billionaire. The numbers are so huge that it’s difficult to even conceptualize.
Also, becoming a billionaire would mean that you’d have to steal the labor value of your employees and Lestrange says that he simply can’t fathom why anyone would want to do that.
If you’re upset by what you’re reading, hearing, and seeing in the news, you probably want to find out more about wealth inequality and what you can do about it. But John understandably mentions that wealth inequality can be daunting.
“A lot of history and economics books are very dense and very dry, and we all, always, struggle with confirmation bias.”
A good starting point is to Google "articles on US wealth inequality”. This simple search will bring you to articles from NATO's Council on Foreign Relations, the PEW Research Center, the World Economic Forum, Brookings, and even Harvard.
If you’d like something longer, The Tale of Two Americas, edited by John Freeman, gets another recommendation from John.
There are ways to alleviate the situation in your community or even on a national scale. John suggests that the best thing to help out is simply mutual aid.
“Build something in your community, hell, build your community. Raise awareness of these issues, educate yourself and others on them.The community, and the people in it, will know what they need and even if one person doesn't have access to a service or a resource someone else might,” John says.
“By coming together as a community, to solve problems within the community, people can do some pretty incredible things. Activist Benjamin Shepard once described it as people giving what they can and getting what they need.”
History Wizard’s video popped off with close to 8M views, over 1M likes, and 32k comments. The commenters supported the notion and enjoyed John’s clear stating of the facts.
Share your own opinions down below!
The comments nearly unanimously agreed with The Wizard's statements
