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Three Australian millionaires say the nation’s super-rich should face higher taxes
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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More tax isn’t the answer given how utterly disgracefully wasteful our government and politicians are with our tax dollars. Give them more and they’ll waste more and enrich themselves more. It also doesn’t fix anything, especially not things like political “donations”/bribes - laws fix things like that, but who make laws? Oh right, the politicians on the take, which is why it won’t happen.
What the billionaires need to do is start and run highly efficient charities that actually help people. They could even just not claim deductions if they want to pay more tax as well.
They should do things like make subscription services for essentials, sold at well below cost, so families and people that are struggling can have guaranteed necessities like basic food, clothes, toiletries, and so on for day $50 a week. This way their money goes directly to the people, not the politicians and their mates. Look at what Mark Cuban has done with his pharmaceutical company for example.
That’s what billionaires should be doing. Pledging to pay more tax when you know you’re never going to have to is just more pathetic virtue signalling. Open a supermarket where nothing is over $5. Start your own health insurance company where there are no exclusions and no excess/deductible for making claims, and it only costs $25 a month. The list of ways they can actually help are endless, they just don’t want to actually do any of them - they just want you to think they want to help.
We could abolish billionaires entirely. No one needs a billion dollars. No one "earns" a billion dollars.
The person you replied to openly supports the March for Australia crowd.
What on earth does anyone’s opinions on a march got to do with the topic at hand?
A former work colleague of mine might. He's well over half-way there at least and still gaining.
He quit his job and wrote some software that is used all over the world. If you make a thing and enough people buy it, you get rich. In his case, very rich. He didn't inherit his wealth. He didn't start out already a millionaire. His wealth is not coming from being a parasite on society. He isn't taking resources or hoarding land. He'll be the first to tell you he is monumentally lucky, but I also can't see anything he's doing that's wrong.
$500 million purely in sales of software he wrote alone? That would be a feat for sure.
Nothing against him personally, just that buy-in-large this former colleague of yours would be an outlier, the ultra wealthy generally generate profits off the backs of other people's work.
The part that's wrong isn't doing well and making money, it's advocating against taxing corporations way more than we are, lobbying for loopholes, and engaging in rent seeking behaviour. Which is extremely, extremely common. Having some kind of cap on how much wealth you can amass seems sensible to me.
I'm sure he's worked hard and done well for himself, but are we really suggesting that once you have money, you don't "make your money work for you"? What that phrase really means is you can invest, which is only possible because of other people's work at the end of the day.
Yes, I am doubting a bit that after his real work of creating a product, that the rest of the money he's made is directly from that work, or made possible by a system that in general is profiting of the working class.
At a certain point allowing people to have vast sums of money is antithetical to democracy, which seems almost self-evident to most people no matter their other political views.
So no, your former work colleague hasn't done anything wrong, but doesn't mean it's a great way for us to structure society. *Gestures broadly to everything*
Initially, it was him and his wife, yes. Though they now have a decent sized company with a few hundred employees. I didn't realise his venture had gotten so big until this thread and I googled him today. Before you get all angry that he's "profiting off those people's work", ask whether those people are better off for working for him or if he should keep all the work and wealth to himself.
I haven't heard of him doing any of those things. Of course I moved to the other side of the country and no longer move in the same circles as he does. He still has a reputation in IT circles for being a chill bloke, though.
I think perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree on this.
I need to reiterate that your former colleague is just living within the system we have, and I can't make personal comment on whether or not he's done any of the worse things I mentioned.
How is this not proving my point?
He has a decent sized company, that generates profits for him from the labour of their workers, who share in a smaller share of those profits. And this is the typical arrangement. I think it's pretty hard to argue that (in most cases) the amount of profit people generate vs what they get paid is just.
I'm sure he's worked hard - well, I guess he has - but it can't be denied that his excess wealth is only possible because of other people's continued labour.
This is fundamentally what we disagree on. He didn't "share" the work. He had an idea, worked hard on that idea, and then hired other people in order to grow his company and make more money. That's capitalism, and people pretend as if it's the only way we can structure society. As if innovation would stop existing without the profit motive.
Innovation would happen regardless. The profit motive only "drives innovation" because that's how we've structured things to work. I also find the claim doesn't hold water because a huge portion of innovations are already from publically funded university research which otherwise wouldn't be funded.
Currently a few people profit massively off other people's labour, and looking at wealth inequality, and pay inequality, it's getting worse and worse every year.
Unless one has the opinion than a tiny percentage of the population is thousands of tens-of-thousands times more productive and deserving than everyone else, then it's kind of hard to argue the current state of the world makes sense.
I have no issue with some people making more money than others to reflect their harder work. But only to a point. The profit motive seems like a stupid way to do this though, because it's also pretty plain to see that innovating is probably not even the main way more profit is achieved.
Monopolies, dark patterns, price gouging, wage theft off-shoring and other anti-competitive behaviours are far more common paths.
Again, nothing against your former colleague personally, as I don't know him.
People absolutely do earn a billion dollars. If you “abolish” billionaires you abolish the drive, determination, innovation etc that creates billionaires who have made some of the most world changing things in history.
All of the world's billionaires have amassed their wealth off other people's labour.
If you can name me ONE billionaire who hasn't, I'll be extremely shocked. One billionaire who just worked for their money.
Selling something to investors is indirectly profiting off others labour, just in advance. You think the investors pull up their sleeves and generate billions? Lol. No no, they get workers to make whatever business profitable.
Some billionaires may have created something worthwhile (Taylor Swift, for example), even she has an army of workers who make her continued career possible. (Even though she definitely was a "self-made" billionaire starting without massive capital).
Billions is so much you can practically never spend it. And no one can work literally >1000x (or much, much more) harder than someone else. Or generate something so worthwhile they deserve billions.
You don't need the profit motive for people to create great things. The creator of insulin sold the patent for $1. And countries like Denmark (while still be capitalists) are proof that more people would be entrepreneurial if they have more of a safety net to try. We're probably missing out of tonnes of innovation simply because the person hasn't been given the chance through education or they're in poverty.
And we only have poverty because we live in a system where you can amass unlimited wealth, on the backs of everyday people, instead of the workers sharing in the profits of their labour.
Without the labour of others, or the proceeds from the labour of others (advertising, investment, etc), it's impossible to make a billion dollars.
That's kind of propaganda that government only wastes tax dollars and big businesses are more efficient. There are inefficiencies in both and one is not significantly more efficient than the other.
This part is absolutely correct. A social billionaire is a direct contradiction.
The idea of billionaires self-regulating is utopian - if they were willing to do this without external coercion, they would already be doing it. At least something like a tax can be enforced, but even then, like you said, politicians who make laws are in the pockets of the owning class. We'd need a radical overhaul of the whole rotten system to be able to enforce any seriously important financial law on them.
That said, creating charities and aid isn't a bad idea, it would be far better for them to support ones which already exist and are struggling. And it's particularly difficult to trust billionaire claims of being charitable when so many already perform investment and other financial activity under the guise of philanthropism. Supporting grassroots aid efforts rather than building charities from scratch would demonstrate legitimacy. And like you said, there is no legitimacy in these claims.