It was an alarming scene last week when protesters set up a guillotine in front of Jeff Bezos’s Washington, D.C., residence.
Made famous during the French Revolution, guillotines were used to execute aristocrats and other revolutionaries, and victims included King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette, Georges Danton, and Maximilien Robespierre.
The target of the more recent guillotine brandishers is the richest man in the world, who has seen his fortune rise to $200 billion in recent months as Amazon’s stock price has soared. Unfortunately, the hatred against Bezos is not an isolated case. Rich people are the only minority group that can be severely criticized with such displays without triggering a wave of indignation.
Wherever you look, rich people have become the enemy. At the Democratic National Convention, there was a great deal of talk about rich people, but none of it was positive. Not one Democrat referred to the rich as creators of wealth or as innovators. No, in the eyes of the Democratic Party, the rich have far more money than they deserve, and it needs to be taken from them through high taxes.
The rich have been cast as boogeymen in Europe, too. All across Germany, the left-wing party Die Linke has emblazoned its posters with the slogan, “Let’s make mincemeat of predatory landlords.” It’s well worth remembering that before you can turn “predatory landlords” into mincemeat, you have to kill them.
At one of Die Linke’s strategy conferences, leading members amused themselves by openly philosophizing about whether it would be best to shoot the wealthiest members of German society or put them in labor camps. At demonstrations on May 1, 2018, in Berlin, protesters brandished posters with hateful slogans such as “Kill your landlord.” The following year’s May 1 demonstration was advertised across the city with posters of a guillotine with the text, “Against the city of the rich.”
Even more regrettably, this hatred of the rich hasn’t always stopped at hurtful slogans and images. On numerous occasions, directors of German real estate companies have become the targets of violent left-wing activists. The hate crimes perpetrated by violent protesters have ranged from setting cars on fire to physical violence against property developers.
Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, hatred has regularly been directed at Bill Gates, who conspiracy theorists absurdly accuse of having created and unleashed the coronavirus in order to make billions from a vaccine.
The problem is not that the conspiracy theorists propagate hatred and violence against the rich. The problem is that such statements are not taboo and are all too often accepted. The same people who are sensitive — and often, arguably, too sensitive — to what they perceive as criticism of members of minority groups have no qualms about populist attacks on the rich, as shown in my comprehensive study called The Rich in Public Opinion.
Just the other day, a journalist asked me whether the world actually needs ultrarich people. I responded by asking him whether the world needs successful entrepreneurs because these two questions are essentially the same. Most rich people become rich as entrepreneurs who invented products that benefited millions, if not billions, of people.
Take a look at the Forbes list of the richest people in the world, and you will see that most of them are self-made entrepreneurs. In many cases, even those who are not self-made continued businesses they inherited from their parents. Jeff Bezos built his fortune because he had a great idea with Amazon. Gates got rich with Microsoft, and Elon Musk has had a lot of great business ideas, including revolutionizing private space travel and building rockets that are much cheaper than those built by the government.
The primary victim of hatred and prejudice against the rich is not, in fact, the rich. They continue to live comfortable lives. The greatest damage is actually done to society when the very people that create new products and millions of jobs with their great ideas are attacked and defamed.
Rainer Zitelmann is a historian and sociologist. He is also a successful businessman, real estate investor, and world-renowned author of 24 books, including The Rich in Public Opinion.
