Hi there! Welcome to my annual May Day sermon. Let’s keep it simple this time: the rich are the scum of the Earth in every country, as G.K. Chesterton correctly said even though he didn’t mean it, and the guillotine is too good for them. Every single billionaire on Earth should have their wealth immediately seized and turned over to the people, and they should then be forced at gunpoint to walk into the ocean.
Could I be more specific, I hear you saying. Sure! Let us take the case of Mr. Jeff Bezos, the ‘genius’ behind Amazon, whose brilliant idea to monopolize the retail market has made him wealthy beyond the dreams of Croesus. Bezos’ holdings are infamous for their cruelty; the Amazon empire is based on abusive and inhuman labor practices and the shunting of private risk onto public resources. His main invention was a service model that has reduced the concept of sustainable employment into an archaic joke, and he is currently seeking to locate a new headquarters for his company, for which he is demanding tribute from the local peasantry even though he is quite literally richer than anyone who has ever lived in the history of the human species and the endeavor will only fatten him further while likely imbuing no benefit whatsoever on the lucky ‘winner’.
Mr. Bezos, who should be eaten by a hungry polar bear, is fond of crowdsourcing ideas for his uncountable wealth. Despite this, he recently threw up his hands in helplessness — feigned? genuine? does it even matter? — at the question of what he might do with his $131 billion fortune, other than use it to make a space ship and jet around the cosmos in some kind of absurd and pointless Flash Gordon dream. (For the record, $131 billion would allow him, if he so chose, to spend three and a half million dollars on whatever he likes every single day for the next century, or roughly four times every hour what the average American earns in a year.) Upon hearing this news, I speculated that I could think of a hundred things he could do better than sinking his cash into a dumb spaceman recess fantasy in an hour’s time, without even resorting to my favorite scenario, which would be that he surrenders it to the new government of the United Socialist States of America just before being thrown off the edge of the Grand Canyon.
But why speculate? Let’s do it.
- Pay every one of his Amazon workers a living wage
- Prevent planned pension cuts to retiring employees of the Washington Post, which he owns
- Perform a hostile takeover of various Donald Trump companies just to be a dick
- Hire someone to assassinate Elon Musk
- Allow himself to be launched into space with existing aerospace technologies, which are more than suitable to such a simple task
- Give free rides to the next 10 million people who want to go to college
- Literally double the income of every American worker who makes minimum wage or less
- Buy up all the debt of every American citizen who has gone bankrupt from medical expenses
- Give every human being on the planet almost 20 dollars
- Place $2.6 billion directly into the coffers of every state in the union
- Spend over $2,000 on every school-age child in America
- Personally ensure that neither the New York Yankees nor the Chicago Cubs ever win a World Series again
- Buy every gun manufacturer in the country and simply destroy all their assets
- Completely pay for the dental care of everyone in America
- Completely pay for the optical care of everyone in America
- Completely pay for the funeral costs of everyone in America
- Buy every homeless person in America a house costing a quarter of a million dollars
- Pay 82 million peoples’ rent/mortgage for a month
- Convert every home in Chicago to solar energy
- Completely eliminate world hunger for at least five years
- Provide clean water for the entire planet for at least fifteen years
- Do literally anything at all for even one poor person
- Buy five million people a new electric car
- Put almost $500 in a high-yield savings account or retirement fund for everyone in America
- Pay all the expenses associated with the birth of the next 4,665,183 babies born in the U.S.
- Lobby successfully for universal health care so that no one in America has to pay for their baby being born
- Buy everyone on the planet a copy of the Communist Manifesto
- Fix the water in Flint, Michigan, and in two thousand other cities
- Fully fund the public transit system in his home city of Seattle for 142 years
- Completely pay the cost of every police brutality lawsuit and wrongful death settlement in the United States for the last century
- Fully fund every national and state park for over twenty years
- Buy everyone on the planet a sack of 10 White Castle cheese sliders for Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and their birthday
- Personally dismantle the entire prison system in the US and still have over $50 billion left over to spend on medical care, job training, and rehabilitation for the inmates
- Clean up the entire Pacific garbage patch, and all other ocean plastic pollution
- Completely subsidize medical marijuana in every state in the US plus Mexico and Canada
- Purchase 1/11th of our F-35 fighters
- Buy everyone in Skokie, Illinois a copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin album at the same price that Martin Shkreli paid for it
- Buy over 177 million doses of Daraprim for what it cost before Martin Shkreli jacked the price up
- Pay all costs related to diabetes for everyone in America for three years even at the vastly overinflated prices charged by the health care industry
- Double the income of every elderly American currently living below the poverty line
- Buy one item from the McDonald’s dollar menu for every human being who is currently alive or has ever lived going all the way back to the dawn of Homo sapiens and still have so much money left over that he would live like a king for the next two hundred years
Hey, look at that, I’m out of space already! In conclusion, though, Jeff Bezos has enough money to buy a beautifully crafted and personally engraved guillotine for himself and every other billionaire on Earth, and after we put them all in them we’d still have enough left over to do basically anything we wanted forever. Happy May Day!