Billionaires and the politics of envy
Billionaires are an ultra-elite social class whose numbers are growing alongside their obscene wealth while others struggle, suffer or even die. They represent a scourge of economic inequality, but how do they get away with being viewed as a ‘force for good’?
In 1974, a year before she became leader of Britain’s Conservative Party and five years before being elected prime minister, Margaret Thatcher stated that she rejected ‘vehemently the politics of envy, the incitement of people to regard all success as if it were something discreditable, gained only by taking selfish advantage of others’. In 1983 United States President Ronald Reagan echoed the same sentiment. ‘If we’re to rebuild our beloved land, then those who practice the politics of envy, … must rise above their rancour and join us in a new dialog … and make America great again.’.
As the neoliberal era was beginning to take shape, Thatcher and Reagan told the world that if economic progress was the goal, then inequality was necessary. The liberated rich would lead the world, and everyone would benefit in the long run, so the story went. As national economies the world over embraced economic deregulation, corporate tax cuts and the virtual end of trade protectionism, a newly globalised world economy emerged, intoxicated by the promise of economic freedom and shared prosperity. The experiment failed. Neoliberalism has led to widening economic inequality and the emergence of a conspicuous billionaire class.
Ideology is much stronger than facts and reducing calls for equality to a politics of envy remains part of regressive conservative politics to this day. In 2022, at the depth of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of Australia’s largest corporations were under attack for taking government handouts to support the payment of wages to their employees, while simultaneously giving lavish bonuses to their executives. Former Prime Minister Scott Morrison waved off the scandal. ‘I’m not into the politics of envy,’ he said. Even Labor Prime Ministers are not immune. When people complained about Anthony Albanese buying a $4.2 million home in 2024, they too were accused of the politics of envy.
Dismissing one’s political adversaries by accusing them of a politics of envy comes hand in hand with the moralisation of unequal wealth and the justification of economic inequality. This is a topsy-turvy world where demands for justice are dismissed as selfishly motivated, bred out of unchecked absorption by the deadly sin of envy. The flip side of the politics of envy is the idea that the wealthy should be revered rather than begrudged. By this account, being rich means being a hard-working ‘winner’ whom others should respect and admire, exponentially so for billionaires. Billionaires are aspirational role models for many people, presented as benevolent and effective – good, even.
The politics of envy reflects a political conviction that economic inequality is both economically necessary and the fair outcome of a meritocratic society.
If you are not rich it is your fault – you are a loser. Fortunately, public awareness and political activism against billionaire excess and calls to action to address inequality are growing. Economist Thomas Piketty, whose extensive and renowned studies on inequality put him in a position to understand the true devastation it can cause, remains inspiringly optimistic. ‘History teaches us that elites fight to maintain extreme inequality, but in the end, there is a long-run movement toward more equality, at least since the end of the 18th century, and it will continue,’ he argues. Such hopefulness, combined with a faith in the possibility of progress, can animate a political will to change things for the benefit of the vast majority of the world’s citizens. No seemingly entrenched and immovable state of injustice is fixed as if history was standing still.
What is decried as the politics of envy is, in fact, a call for economic justice. The call was seen in activist movements such as Occupy Wall Street in 2011. It is around today everywhere from the ‘tax the rich’ movement, to the so-called ‘eat the rich’ genre of movies that explore themes of capitalism and inequality. New demands for equality can be found in the resurgent socialism of Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom. What is clear is that in recent years there has been a growing discontent with the wealth and power controlled by the world’s most rich.
Acclaimed author Ursula LeGuin stated, when being awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014, that: ‘We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.’ As a footnote to LeGuin’s insight, it can be added that under contemporary capitalism, there is a profound risk returning to something akin to the divine right of kings, only now those kings are billionaires. All the more reason to resist. All the more reason to demand justice. All the more reason for change.
This is an edited extract from: Carl Rhodes (2025) Stinking Rich: The Four Myths of the Good Billionaire, Bristol University Press.
BY Carl Rhodes
Carl Rhodes is Dean and Professor of Organization Studies at the University of Technology Sydney Business School. Carl writes about the ethical and democratic dimensions of business and work. Carl’s most recent books are Woke Capitalism: How Corporate Morality is Sabotaging Democracy (Bristol University Press, 2022), Organizing Corporeal Ethics (Routledge, 2022, with Alison Pullen) and Disturbing Business Ethics (Routledge, 2020).
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Do Australian corporations have the courage to rebuild public trust?
Corporate Australia is having a rough time in 2023.
PwC made headlines for selling out Australian citizens by flogging details of the government’s tax avoidance schemes to potential corporate tax avoiders. Qantas has been raked over the coals for, amongst other things, lying to customers and illegally sacking workers. Elsewhere corporations are pilloried for scandalously excessive executive pay, Dickensian industrial relations standards, wilfully aggressive tax avoidance, and heartless profiteering.
Research by the market researchers at Roy Morgan recently revealed that the level of trust Australians have in corporations is at the lowest it has ever been since they started measuring it. The downward trend started with COVID but has been in free fall since the middle of 2022. Roy Morgan CEO Michelle Levine describes what is going on as the result of ‘moral blindness’ of corporations.
There is an apparent irony in play. Today’s corporations are accused of this moral blindness, while many publicly embrace ethics by taking increasingly active roles in important matters of public purpose and social impact. Corporations are weighing in on a variety of crucial political issues, such as the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, LGBTQIA+ rights, and the climate crisis.
Business as a force for good?
In the era of ‘woke capitalism’ the business world seems to feel little cognitive dissonance, let alone hypocrisy, about parading their ethical credentials in public while acting like ruthless and exploitative profiteers in the market. Being economically exploitative and socially progressive is the name of the game for many corporations.
The socially progressive position regards businesses as having the potential to be a ‘force for good’, especially by adopting progressive positions on social and environmental causes. Think of Qantas’ ‘pride flights’, PwC’s commitment to social impact, or the broad adoption of diversity and climate change initiatives by businesses of all kinds.
Many regard corporate engagement with political causes as being genuinely motivated by ethical care for their ‘stakeholders’. This view is not universal. Others see corporate activism as comprising of shallow, inauthentic and self-interested grandstanding. Between green-washing, woke-washing and virtue-signalling, corporations have been accused of using ethics to feather their own nests.
Yet others see corporate social and environmental engagement as incontrovertible evidence that CEOs have been held captive by radical left-wing activists. By this account weak-willed executives are being exploited by nefarious militants trying to use corporations as a Trojan Horse to infiltrate mainstream society.
The ‘vile maxim’ of corporate selfishness
Whichever position you might be aligned with, so-called ‘woke’ practices are in apparent contrast to the exploitative and ruthless competitive behaviours of companies like Qantas and PwC that have contributed to the demise of trust in corporations. When it comes to business, the ethical principle at play is akin to what, many years ago, economist Adam Smith condemned as the ‘vile maxim’. As he wrote in The Wealth of Nations back in 1776:
“All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons.”
It is clear that many people running businesses today are enthusiastic followers of this vile maxim. To suggest this is ‘moral blindness’ can be misleading because (no matter how vile) there is an ethics at play here, and one that is widely accepted. Ayn Rand notoriously championed such an ethics as being beholden to ‘the virtue of selfishness’. By Rand’s account, pursuing self-interest is a valid, if not desirable, moral position. She stood against sacrifice as being a moral principle, instead seeing merit in “concern with one’s own interests”.
Free market capitalism was, for Rand, an ideal manifestation of her ethics. This all suggests that selfishness is not moral blindness, it is part of an ethical system that drives much business behaviour. It is also the ethics that is at the heart of Australia’s lack of confidence in the corporate world.
How to build trust
Between the twin poles of ‘woke capitalism’ and the ‘vile maxim’ we have something of a corporate identity crisis. Increasingly selfish profit-seeking in the economic sphere is matched with attestations to the pursuit of public good in the social sphere. That is not to say that all companies are vile or woke, clearly many are not. It is a fair call that enough of them are that it has led to a breakdown of public confidence in corporate Australia.
What does this all mean for how Australian corporations can build public trust? One answer is resolving their identity crisis by truly embracing and communicating the role of business in a liberal-democratic society. While businesses are responsible for returns on capital investment, that is neither their sole nor primary purpose. Neither is supporting progressive social positions without concern for the economy.
In its present condition Australian corporate capitalism is characterised by skyrocketing economic inequality, excessive executive pay, inflation fuelled by profiteering, and increasingly precarious employment. That Australian citizens do not trust corporations is an entirely rational assessment.
Corporate Australia’s challenge is to actively recognise and pursue its real social purpose. This purpose is about driving innovation and economic growth for shared prosperity, providing meaningful and secure jobs with decent pay, paying taxes that fund public services, as well as ensuring investors get a reasonable return.
Rebuilding trust is simple. What remains to be seen is which of Australia’s fallen corporations will have the courage to abandon their attachment to the vile maxim.
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