I was always a little ambivalent about billionaires. In substantial part, this was because the armies of vapid leftoids who banged on about neoliberalism and tax or whatnot, had manifestly very little understanding of the “unbridled capitalism” they were seemingly railing against. Many of them, of course, were unwitting agents of the hedge fund billionaires that were riding the asset bubble, who themselves had very little to fear from this incarnation of the left. As I’ve argued here previously, Occupy Wall Street didn’t occupy Wall Street; Wall Street occupied Occupy Wall Street. However, I will admit to finding something odd about this new variant of hypercapitalist, as he straddles a hyperaccumulation of capital.
Another part of it is understanding the motivation. And in this, I turn to ten to the power of N+1…
£100 = £1 — probably isn’t going to stop you being hungry even once.
£101 = £10 — you’ll be okay for today.
£102 = £100 — this week’s food is covered, still some bills and the rent.
£103 = £1,000 — things are still a bit tight for a month.
£104 = £10,000 — you’re on your way if you can keep this up each year, but it’s still peanuts in the West.
£105 = £100,000 — you’re on your way to the world’s top 1%, but it still wouldn’t buy you a flat in a dump of a town in Britain.
£106 = £1,000,000 — you’ve arrived. This is a modest house plus decent pension.
£107 = £10,000,000 — you can retire in sheer luxury now.
£108 = £100,000,000 — nobody in your family ever needs to work again.
£109 = £1,000,000,000 — nobody in your family or any of your friends, needs to work again.
£108 = £10,000,000,000 — nobody you’ve ever met, or their children, ever have to work again.
£109 = £100,000,000,000 — Oh, come on! Seriously?
And, according to some, we’ve still got an order of magnitude to go to get to Elon’s net worth.
My point isn’t that this scale shows anything in and of itself bad. My question is how this might separate us, if we asked, “when do you stop seeking this accumulation?” I’m curious, as I can see why engineers — of machines and software — do it. I can relate to that, having worked in such industries. I.e. “let’s build a bigger spaceship”. I find the money industry, where it’s about sheer accumulation of assets, slightly harder to fathom. I don’t think I could find the motivation for something that I find so boring, after about 10 to the 6, definitely 7. Trading, no doubt, becomes its own sport, but one that seems to require philanthropy to offset something it recognises about itself. Money isn’t enough!
Hedge funder Christopher Hohn is likely the UK’s biggest “philanthropic” donor. I’ve written a hell of a lot about the work of his manifestly political “philanthropy”, through his Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), and the European Climate Foundation (ECF), which he appear to have the majority share of, but which is supported by other billionaires. The ECF grew out of the US-based Climateworks Foundation. And between the handful of grantees involved in these sordid little outfits, sufficient funds were made available to ideological zealots and others, to change European politics, such that its industries turned to rust and its economies are stagnating. All of “civil society” has been bought, and turned against the public. Rather than recognising it, those who are standing on its empty husk seem bent on war. At least it will be quick.
Hohn was the subject of a bizarre Times puff piece recently. It was presented as an interview, but it put no real challenge to Hohn other than the question about whether or not his style of philanthropy has been successful, or is dead. I wrote about it for the Daily Sceptic, and copied the article below. The Times has been producing a lot of climate guff recently — and indeed there has been something of a resurgence of alarmism following the heatwaves, which are now over. I can’t help wondering if Hohn et al are giving it one last push before pulling out.
Anyway, acquiring assets for the sake of acquiring assets worth billions and billions and billions of dollars manifestly has not been enough for Hohn. He feels the need to assert his vanity over the decisions of tens of millions, perhaps billions of others. And that’s why I think people begin to wonder, perhaps there is something wrong with what began as the desire to accumulate a large pile of wealth, far beyond what anyone could need for themselves.
These fiefdoms do not seem to want to leave us alone. So how can we ambivalent about the hyperaccumulation of capital? How can we not care, either way, about billionaires? What’s the minimum that could be done to confine their influence to their castles?
As the Westminster consensus on climate change continues to disintegrate, the Green Blob’s heavy, clumsy hand can be seen in the increased frequency and intensity of messaging in response to its existential crisis. In previous articles here, I noted the Telegraph‘s Tim Stanley and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s struggles with the reality, and how the one-time intellectual-Left organ, the New Statesman, had eschewed reason in order to sustain its commitment to green ideology. Similarly, last week the more radical Left-wing Novara Media featured an overlong interview with Greta Thunberg’s climate alarmism mentor Kevin Anderson. And the Sunday Times featured a large puff-piece on green blob financier Sir Christopher Hohn. What these attempts to consolidate green positions across the political spectrum reveal, however, is that no part of the green political axis has developed any understanding of why it has been unable to sustain its assaults on democratic politics, and why doubling down on climate alarmism is a losing tactic.
Wisdom tells us to ‘make hay while the sun shines’ and also to ‘strike while the iron is hot’. It has indeed been hot, and a lot of hay has been made across central and southern England. Dramatic images of fires, as they do each summer, seem to underscore the climate narrative. And so these events set the scene for the ritual in which the Green Blob tries to assert itself and establish a new sense of urgency ahead of the late autumn’s climate meetings. The fundamental problem for such blobbers is that they’re trying to turn weather that most Brits pay thousands of pounds for a fortnight of into a harbinger of doom. It may well be a record-breaking summer, but all that such record-breaking does is remind us of how utterly removed from reality green alarmism is. The soundtrack to the summer isn’t so much Orff’s Carmina Burana as Boney M’s Hooray! Hooray! It’s a Holi-Holiday.
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