Real talk though: every American billionaire is the result of a serious legislative failure in a functional democracy.

You don’t have to be a socialist, whatever you think that is, to realize a society that allows for the existence of billionaires is a partner in its own demise.

Billionaires are not sustainable. They are not ethical. It honestly doesn’t matter who they are as people; even the idea of a benevolent billionaire is antithetical to democracy.

That level of wealth creates a ruling class, passed down by birth when we under-tax estates.

As Thomas Paine noted, when we allow for the creation of a ruling class, “the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interest.”

Billionaires are an existential threat to democracy.

Yet millions of Americans rush to the defense of billionaires.

Why?

The human brain is not wired to truly understand the concept of a billion dollars, or the probability that we’ll ever see it. We’re the unemployed dad buying the lotto ticket because “someone’s gotta win it.”

Every billionaire origin story makes it worse. There are no self-made billionaires.

Tom Steyer’s hedge fund, which invested in private prisons and coal mining, also helped investors avoid taxes by running their earnings through an offshore company.

Loopholes make billionaires.

And the thing is, we’ve gotten to a point where we accept that as commonplace. The President himself bragged about avoiding taxes on the campaign trail.

The richest 400 Americans pay the lowest tax rates.

We simply can’t go on giving handouts to the people who need it least.