I'm Pro Trillionaire

No sunsetting, no caps. This was my philosophy back when I was designing commission plans. If you want to attract and retain the best salespeople in a free-market economy, you don’t limit their upside.

Whenever someone on the team told me they wanted to make as much as a salesperson, I had the same series of questions:

• Are you willing to have your compensation fluctuate with your book of business?

• Can you stomach the stress of owning a revenue goal?

• Are you okay with digging a thousand dry holes in order to find a single lead?

Yes? Yes? And yes? HAVE AT IT.

Building a business—any business—is really hard, and I have no problem with the people who excel at it earning a lot of money, even objectively silly amounts of money.

I believe innovation is, on balance, good for the world, and while I dislike¹, say, Elon Musk, I love electric cars, lightning-fast internet, and reusable rockets. If the prospect of extraordinary rewards is at least part of what drives such breakthroughs², HAVE AT IT. Unlike so-called “Limitarians,” I’m okay with the existence of billionaires and even—extending the same logic—trillionaires.

Here’s what I’m not okay with:

1. Having That Tiny Group of Insanely Wealthy People Control Our Politics

In a perfect world, we’d have short, publicly-funded campaigns. No one person would have any influence beyond their own vote, and no company or organization could buy a politician.

Short of that democratic nirvana, we must overturn Citizens United—or more realistically: undermine it, state by state. We must also implement and enforce strict ethics standards for lawmakers; stock trading while in office and other corporate entanglements are a bipartisan plague.

2. A Playing Field That Is In No Way Even

Many Americans believe the system is rigged because, in important ways, it is. The ultra-wealthy don’t just have more money. They inhabit a different system entirely: concierge medicine, nannies and aides, private schools, private transportation. Advantages compound: there is far less social mobility in the U.S. than the American Dream would have us believe.

A genuinely level playing field would require affordable healthcare, childcare, education, transportation, housing, and food. To help fund these—the building blocks of equal opportunity—we urgently need tax reform, including so-called wealth taxes. (If this makes you nervous… congratulations? Most proposals for really steep rates kick in only after tens of millions of dollars.)

3. Moral Depravity

If you’re a now-trillionaire (then-billionaire) who not only failed to follow through on a brag to end world hunger but, four years later, delighted in cutting programs that once kept hundreds of thousands of children alive, should we revere you? No, obviously not. Can we despise you? I sure can!

I love the free market for the many problems it can solve. What it can’t do—what it’s never done—is tell us what really matters.

Image credit: Photo by Logan Voss on Unsplash

1. With the intensity of a thousand suns.

2. I am aware that the U.S., while having a remarkable track record, does not have a monopoly on innovation, and in fact China—as one example—is lapping us on a number of fronts, especially advanced manufacturing. That’s because the CCP (wisely) acts as a hyper-aggressive venture capitalist, throwing heaps of money at competing teams—may the fittest survive. It’s smart industrial policy, but as a citizen, I’d still choose to live in a place where you can make fun of the government.