Billionaires and Everyone Else

Will Wilkinson, former libertarian and now a professed "centrist," goes after Democrats who think the mere existence of billionaires is a sign of something very wrong with a country. Wilkinson compares a country's rank on the Human Development Index, a generally left-leaning assessment, with the number of billionaires per capita, and he finds that six countries have both higher HDI ranks and more billionaires than the US:

Human Development

Index rank

Billionaires

per capita rank

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

7

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

17

19

20

Norway

Switzerland

Australia

Ireland

Germany

Iceland

Hong Kong

Sweden

Singapore

Netherlands

Denmark

Canada

United States

Britain

Finland

New Zealand

Liechtenstein

Belgium

Japan

Austria

8

4

13

11

12

7

2

6

5

27

16

15

10

19

14

31

1

44

41

18

Personally I would be happy to run up taxes on the rich and redistribute some of their money to the poor, but I am as uncomfortable as Wilkinson with some of the "eat the rich" rhetoric coming from the American left these days. The countries on the list above are good places to live in large part because they try to follow their own rules and treat everyone decently. All people in these societies have rights, including rich people. I think inequality is a threat to our democracies but it might be true that anger is a worse one, and that always needs to be guarded against.

All the best places in the world to live have mixed economies with a large element of capitalism. There are no socialist nations anywhere near as nice. Under capitalism, some people get really rich. You may not like it, but that just seems to be how things are at this stage of technological and social development.