Taxing billionaires won’t solve anything long term because it’s an attempt to treat a specific symptom of a systemic issue. The systemic issue is how extra spending power is created in the economy, and who can use it first. In practice, most of the extra spending power shows up as debt. When borrowing is cheap and plentiful, the people with the strongest access to credit act first, and the first prices to move are the things routinely bought with leverage, like housing and financial assets. You can see it in something as basic as mortgage rates. If rates fall, buyers can suddenly “afford” a bigger loan for the same monthly payment. The bricks and mortar stay the same. What changes is how high people can bid. We call that rise “wealth creation”. Sometimes it is. A company really does improve. A neighbourhood really does become more desirable. But a lot of what people experience as wealth creation is just dilution. More pounds chasing the same limited set of real things. Prices can rise in pounds without rising much in real terms because the money is worth less. Same with shares. The business might be getting better, but cheap money can push the price up far beyond the underlying change. It’s also why the billionaire headline is misleading. People like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos built real companies that did real work. But their wealth isn’t a pile of cash. It’s mostly the market price of the shares they still own. And share prices are extremely sensitive to cheap money. When borrowing is cheap and savings earn very little, investors pay higher prices for the same future profits. That pushes valuations up, and it pushes measured billionaire wealth up with it. It spills into healthcare and education too, because both are increasingly financed by borrowing and third‑party payment. When supply is hard to expand quickly and someone else is paying most of the bill (or the bill is spread over decades), prices and costs can drift upward for a long time without the normal discipline you’d see in a more direct, cash-based market. That’s how a society ends up with a deep, grinding feeling that the basics keep getting further away, even while the economy is supposedly growing. And it’s how you get resentment between asset owners (often called “the rich”) and wage earners (often called “the poor”). If you’re close to cheap credit, you can buy what gets bid up first. If not, you pay the higher prices with wages that lag behind. Or, you’re simply priced out. If you’re unaware of the mechanism, it’s natural to blame the people who benefit from it, whether they understand the mechanics or not. And that’s why the system will try wealth taxes. It’ll start with the most politically palatable targets, the billionaires, because they’re few in number and easy to point at. But most billionaire wealth isn’t sitting as cash. It’s tied up in businesses and shares. To tax it heavily, you either need forced sales, which creates knock-on effects, or an expanding enforcement machine to value, monitor, and control it. At the same time, the underlying symptoms don’t go away if the currency is still being diluted and the new borrowing still lifts assets first. So the public stays angry, and politics has to do something again. It’s a slippery slope. If taxing billionaires doesn’t stop the widening gap, the next target becomes millionaires. Then it becomes anyone with property. Then it becomes pensions, because pensions are one of the last big pools of savings in the system. And because capital is mobile, the next tool is restrictions and penalties to stop people leaving or moving money. Exit taxes, higher taxes on selling, more reporting, more control. Meanwhile, because the measuring stick is shrinking, more ordinary people get pulled into the definition of “rich” anyway. House prices inflate, pension values rise in pounds, and suddenly people who feel middle class on a monthly budget get treated like “wealthy” on paper. That’s how a policy that begins with billionaires quietly drifts toward anyone with anything. And none of it fixes the root. Because if the currency keeps being diluted, and the diluted money keeps flowing into assets first, we’ll keep getting the same widening gap even after it’s taxed. We’ll replay the same argument every few years with higher stakes, more division, and more demand for control. After so long with these incentives, fixing it from within is extremely unlikely. Politics becomes performance because performance is what gets rewarded. So we get endless symptom management, not a change to the underlying design. That doesn’t mean there’s no exit. It means the exit probably doesn’t come from the same institutions that benefit from the current design. Now, here’s the hopeful part. A parallel system is being built that doesn’t require political permission. Bitcoin is simply a set of rules anyone can opt into. A global monetary network with a fixed supply and no committee that can quietly dilute it. For the first time, ordinary people have a realistic choice to save in something that can’t be debased to fund the system. The transition will still be messy. The existing system will still reach for more control as the symptoms worsen. But there’s hope because there’s now an opt‑out that doesn’t depend on asking the winners to change the rules. Happy New Year.