Are Billionaires Simply Money Addicts - Like Scrooge McDuck?

Why are the GOP and billionaires so committed to gutting worker protections while increasing the wealth of the top one percent?

Do elite Republicans and the CEOs who fund them hate working people? Or are they simply unable to control themselves, even when deep down inside they know they’re ruining America?

In Ohio, there’s a growing statewide petition effort to get a constitutional amendment on this fall’s ballot to raise the $10.45 minimum wage to $15, including tipped workers. It’s increasingly looking like it’ll make the ballot, so Republicans in the state senate have come up with a plan to take the steam out of the petition drive: promise legislation that, they say, would raise the minimum wage to $15 except for tipped workers, who’d see a raise from $5.25 to $7.50, and phase it in over 4 years. The bill, according to one of its sponsors, was written by the restaurant industry.

Bernie Moreno, Ohio’s Republican candidate for the US Senate against incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown, was recently forced by a court to pay $400,000 in wages he’d stolen from employees at his used car business and says he thinks there shouldn’t be a minimum wage at all.

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis just signed into law a Republican bill that forbids cities in the state from mandating employers provide outdoor workers with “heat protections” including water. The legislation, largely written by agricultural industry lobbyists, also scales back child labor protections and forbids cities from instituting their own safeguards for children in the workplace.

In Iowa, a Republican majority in the state legislature wiped out public employees’ right to collectively bargain; it was signed by the state’s Republican governor with a new twist, mimicking a recent move by Florida’s DeSantis, making it illegal for the state to automatically deduct union wages from state workers’ paychecks.

These efforts are the tiniest tip of the iceberg: anti-worker legislation designed to keep working people poor has been passed repeatedly, in various forms, in every Republican-controlled state in the nation at the same time Republican legislatures in Red states compete to see who can lower taxes on their state’s rich people the most.

Which raises the question: Why?

When working people have more money in their pockets, they tend to spend almost all of it. Thus, as wages increase and more people move into the middle class, the result is almost always an economic stimulus to the state which raises both the revenues and the profits of businesses in that state.

We saw this nationwide in the 1940-1980 era when wages for working class people grew even faster than the income of the top 1 percent, and in multiple states and cities that have seen economic vitality grow after raising their minimum wage.

When workers have safety protections, they’re less likely to be injured, reducing costs of workman’s compensation, health insurance, and hiring replacements. When children are kept out of the workplace, they’re more likely to get an education and grow up with more opportunity and lifetime economic stability.

So, again, why are Republicans and the billionaires who own them so committed to gutting worker protections while increasing the wealth of the top one percent?

Could it be that these billionaire and multimillionaire CEOs are simply addicts who’ve developed an elaborate religious, political, and cultural rationalization for their addiction?

Science shows that acquiring wealth stimulates the pleasure/reward circuits in the brain’s ventromedial prefrontal cortex, just behind the eyes in the front-most part of the brain. Studies that map blood flow and electrical activity in the brain demonstrate that even anticipating money lights up this region, much like what happens when we’re presented with food or sex.

Sometimes we become aware of this.

I’m still haunted by the insight of a woman who called into my radio program about a year ago and noted that for most of her life she’d lived paycheck-to-paycheck but, because of some life circumstance (perhaps it was an inheritance: I don’t recall), she now has more money than she needs. She’s secure.

“And I find myself checking my bank balance every day,” she told me, as I recall. “I never did that before.”

She seemed troubled by her apparent newfound “love of money,” probably because so many Christians were raised to believe Paul when he wrote to Timothy: 

“For the love of money is the root of all evil: which, while some coveted after, they have … pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”

Jesus, of course, was history’s most famous socialist: he and his disciples shared everything they owned via a common purse. When a rich man asked him how to get to heaven, Jesus told him to sell everything he owned and give the money to the poor.

Not exactly a billionaire’s or CEO’s mantra.

Jesus notwithstanding, in our society we’re trained from childhood to respect and even worship great wealth. Cinderella is desperate to marry a rich prince. Brave knights serve their feudal lords and kings. Jack climbs his beanstalk and risks his life to steal a giant bag of gold coins.

We’re also trained by many of our religions to defer to wealth. Royal families have told their people for centuries that they rightly rule because it’s their god’s will.

Some British coins have the inscription “ELIZABETH II : D G REG : F D” on them, an abbreviation for the Latin Dei Gratia Regina Fidei Defensor which roughly translates to: 

“She rules [Britain] and defends the faith by the grace of God.” 

The American version of this comes via the followers of the 16th century protestant reformer John Calvin, who fled European religious persecution and populated the US east coast and western Michigan in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The big challenge of that pre-democracy era was determining how to create a consensus around who should run society, from business to governments. How to find the truly “good people” who’d make the right decisions for society?

Instead of salvation coming from confession or good works, Calvin taught, his god decided our social station before we were even born (predestination). As St. Paul wrote in Ephesians 1:4–6 and Calvin loved to quote, each of our fates was determined “before the foundation of the world.” 

Thus, Calvinists concluded, whoever has the most money must have the biggest measure of spiritual blessing, chosen by their god even before birth. And those with the most spiritual blessing should, of course, run things from companies to governments.

It’s a nice sales pitch for the morbidly rich, and our society revels in it to this day, if less consciously than in the era of kings and kingdoms. And it distracts us from the damage these wealthy people do to our society and our politics.

Just look at the deference we give to the very rich in our society, and how they’ve nearly completely taken over our political and economic system. Trump’s main claim to fame, for example, is his assertion that he’s “really rich,” which seems to thrill his cult followers. People treat billionaires like rock stars. See: Davos.

But, like Scrooge McDuck, many of these wealthy people are simply addicts, constantly seeking the dopamine rush of another million or billion dollars added to their money bins. To keep that wealthy growing, they make the most profitable investment available to truly rich Americans: they buy politicians who will cut their taxes and reduce regulatory costs for their companies.

The latest twist they’ve found, since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery, has been to buy judges themselves: both the Supreme Court, the federal judiciary, and state courts are now stacked with jurists hand-picked by servants of the morbidly rich for their deference to great wealth.

Addicts usually do a lot of damage before their compulsions are brought under control. In this case, these wealth and power addicts have ripped America apart, gutted the middle class, and have largely converted our democracy into oligarchy. Those wealth addicts in the fossil fuel industry are actively dooming all life on the planet to disaster just to increase their dopamine highs.

Years of research on addiction tell us that the first step to recovery is to deny addicts access to the substance that triggers their addiction. With substances like methadone, we’ve learned to allow addicts to stave off withdrawal in a way that prevents them from damaging society in their never-ending quest for another “hit.”

From the 1930s to the 1980s, we used income tax brackets between 74% and 90% to keep the wealth junkies from damaging the rest of us.

It’s time to relearn that lesson and re-institute the societally protective tools that will minimize the damage the morbidly rich can inflict on the rest of us, including reversing Citizens United and returning to a top 74% tax rate on income over $5 million a year.

Without taking these steps to protect American democracy, we can expect these addicts to continue to chip away at our democracy and keep pushing their bought-off stooges into power.

With these steps, we can return our society and government to a semblance of stability and reinvigorate both democratic norms and a vital middle class.