We read through Google AI that in January 2020, “The wealth of the world's billionaires was approximately $8 trillion,” and that in April 2025, “A record 3,028 billionaires had a combined net worth of $16.1 trillion.” This signifies that over the last five years that the wealth of billionaires has doubled. Perhaps this is a good thing, but in reality, it’s mainly a very good thing for billionaires and is not a good thing for those who are, in essence, subsidizing those billionaires; as well as it isn’t good for societies, for the more unequal a society is, the more systemic problems that it thereby has.
When it comes to governments, it has to be remembered that governments need money in order to conduct their business, and the best place to scare up money is going to be taxing appropriately those who have buckets and buckets of money, as in billionaires. Regrettably, governments the world over seem to have effectively been “captured” by those billionaires, so that billionaire wealth isn’t taxed at the levels that it should be, and, of further insult, they aren’t taxed appropriately when they no longer are among the living.
There was a time when the middle class of America was the envy of the world, which perhaps is still sort of true today, but those that have spent any time looking at the sheer numbers of the declining middle class, and their general nervousness that they will be able to maintain their position, let alone improve such, would make most people re-evaluate that all is well, for the middle class is being squeezed, so that though it has been said we will always have the poor amongst us, we also have a middle class which is not nearly as secure as it should and ought to be.
We seem, therefore, to be on a path in which, just as in times of old, societies will be structured and are being structured in a way in which the superrich have everything, with a small enclave of those that directly or indirectly support those superrich personages, and in which everyone else pretty much has the scrapes off the master’s tablecloth to live upon. Indeed, inexorably we are returning to serfdom, because without a government that actually is of, for, and by the people, we have instead a government that is of, for, and by the billionaire class, proved by the fact that billionaires are consistently getting their way in everything that affects them, and thereby getting ever richer, which thus signifies that the mass of the population is getting ever poorer and thus have ceded their hopes of achieving the American dream, to those that have more than enough already.
It could be said that life is a battlefield, and if that is so, the battle is clearly in the distinct favor of the billionaire class, which is an incredibly small subset of the people that populate societies. This signifies that the “lord of the manor” is back, and is bigger and more powerful than before, for when that which governs us has been compromised on behalf of the superrich, then the result is what we see today, and unless the billionaire class is brought to heel, we as a people will return to being lackeys and serfs.