It’s time we stopped creating and praising billionaires

That in 2025, the EU had 500 billionaires, 39 more than in 2024, meaning one is being created every nine days on average. And that altogether, the richest 3,600 Europeans now hold as much wealth as the poorest 181 million, which is the populations of Germany, Italy and Spain combined. 

The solution, says Oxfam, is simple enough: tax the super-rich, because currently they pay a lower tax rate than ordinary workers, which is a mad system.  So tax wealth and capital at the same rate as income tax, have proper inheritance taxes that cannot be dodged and then slap an extra 5% tax on millionaires and billionaires which could raise €286.5bn a year (around £248.5bn).

To put that in context, that is equivalent to the European Commission’s new budget, which has been designed to repair the damage of Covid and reform the European economy to meet the new challenges from China and America. 

So a policy that would benefit each and every citizen across a whole continent, boost growth and help develop new green industries. Or you could just give every European citizen a €600 (£520) tax cut, each and every year.

In the UK such a tax would raise £1.75 billion from the Hinduja family a year alone. The top nine British billionaires on the Sunday Times Rich list would pay £9.65 billion a year; that is just from nine families and they would still have £186 billion left between them, to scrape by on. 

In America Elon Musk would pay $12 billion (£9bn) per year – which he is hardly likely to miss – and the top ten billionaires would pay $77 billion (£57.5bn). 

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But popular as this policy will doubtless be, it tends to miss the point that the rich are difficult to tax, different countries have different taxation policies and systems and coordinating them is almost impossible and therefore the super-rich can almost always game the system, move to tax havens, or just play one country off against another. The EU does not have a unified taxation system and seems unlikely to ever have one. 

The key is therefore, I think, not to tax billionaires, it is to stop billionaires being created in the first place. That might be portrayed as anti-free enterprise, competition and success; but it is in fact the exact opposite.

There is a perfectly rational economic argument that if someone can become a billionaire, it is not because they are a genius but because there is something desperately wrong with the economy that lets them amass such a fortune. 

If someone becomes a billionaire, here is what we should be asking (rather than venerating them and letting them into government): What happened to their rivals? How did they manage to dominate a whole industry or sector, getting so big that they can bully politicians?  What unfair advantages have they used?

The truth is that the supposed free-market economies they operate in are not encouraging free markets, or even competition. They allow one firm to dominate a sector and create monopolies which gouge customers, impoverish workers and suppliers and governments. If we are creating billionaires, it is because we are letting them rip us all off. 

But as the Trump administration has shown, the super-rich are not only making absolutely amazing amounts of money but they will do almost anything to make even more. They want a free hand to crush competition, to pay even less tax than the minimum amount they pay now, and they will happily buy up whole media organisations to suppress facts and criticism, push their case and even help elect authoritarian governments so long as they let them fill their boots. 

Things are not that bad in Europe yet, but they are getting that way and eventually something will have to be done about it. 

Just as at the start of the 20^th century in America, the economy is being dominated by fewer and fewer people with only completely shameless self-interest as their lodestar. Now as then, they will have to have their feathers clipped if the economy as a whole is to prosper. 

The answer then is not to tax them out of existence but to split up their monopolies and force the new companies to compete, provide better products and services at lower prices. In short, make them poorer by making them compete more. 

That is how a free market is supposed to work, it is how capitalism is supposed to work. Billionaires getting richer are just another sign that neither are working.