Most billionaires nowadays are not the type that have the bulk of their wealth in assets. The lot of them got wealthy because the company they founded or initially employed with became very successful and the stock they accumulated became more valuable over time.

In a way, it’s wealth up there in the ether. It’s the investors who give it value. Somebody says “hey $100 for a share of company x sounds like a good deal” founder has 10M shares of company x, and voila, they’re a billionaire.

In a way, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

A strange thing is happening nowadays with the market though. Markets are supposed to go down from time to time, but due to low barriers to entry so many people are in the market now, investing in ETFs, setting up automated monthly purchases, DRIPs, etc, that markets consistently go up. Even after a major economic shock like the tariffs, the market continues to go up.

And so those billionaires keep getting wealthier.

At some point this carousel will end. Healthy markets do have to go down, it’s one of the mechanisms of how capital gets redistributed from the slovenly to the savvy. There has to be some kind of adjustment or we end up where we are, a new Gilded Age.

China is on the edge of one such adjustment in real estate, but the state is pulling out all of the stops right now to prevent its collapse. What happens there likely is to be a harbinger of what’s to come.

In the US, I’m not so sure. If we keep letting our average population age slip towards middle age and beyond, then we’ll likely see the correction when we have no one left to keep the economic engine running. If we don’t mitigate that we probably have 15 to 20 years left. Unchecked political unrest may be the catalyst for its arrival sooner.

Back to billionaires. The best way to put this back in check in my mind is to tax unrealized gains. Think of it like real estate tax. Every year, you pay a nominal bit of your home’s value to fund the fire department, city planners, etc. if you don’t pay, then they can put a lien on your house. Same should apply with stock. The noninvesting public helped build the infrastructure that made the company thrive, thus, the public should be entitled to a bit of its success. The tax has the nifty little gimmick of distributing a bit of the power too - precisely why the billionaire class hates it.