A Conservative Case Against Billionaires
Billionaires are an abhorrent aberration.
Some of you will be thinking “absolutely” and others might be thinking “what the hell? where are you going with this?”
Before I continue, let me state that I am a conservative, from a long line of Conservatives (and Liberals) and what you will read is a conservative case against billionaires. Note that I use the small c for me, as I have not been a member of the Conservative party for a decade and I would consider the current party to be radical - but that’s for another time.
This post started as a rant in my head after reading too many articles about billionaires behaving as billionaires do: extracting value. The most recent article, the one that triggered this post, is excellent and well worth a read: The billionaire philanthropist making hundreds of Londoners homeless.
While modern day “conservatives” have abandoned conservatism, some of the problems that should concern conservatives have been taken up by progressives. Chief among these problems are billionaires. Before we get stuck into the meat of the problem, let’s draw out what it means to be a conservative.
What It Means To Be A Conservative
Much of what is seen by many as modern “conservatism” isn’t conservatism at all. Conservatism isn’t the defence of the wealthy. It isn’t the worship of market outcomes as though markets were handed down from God rather than constructed by human beings within legal and social frameworks. And it certainly isn’t the reflexive protection of whoever happens to be on top at any given moment.
Conservatism is the defence of continuity, community, and obligation. It is the belief that society is fragile, that institutions represent accumulated wisdom we shouldn’t casually discard, and that the social fabric (of family, church, civic association, and local community) is more valuable than any abstract ideology, including the ideology of unlimited markets.
What conservatives are supposed to conserve is not wealth. It is society itself.
You may be thinking: what has a tech blog got to do with billionaires and conservatism? Most billionaires are from the tech industry, so they are a problem of the industry I work in, and as this is a personal blog, I can write about anything I want, such as Scrum and Catholicism.
The Problem With Billionaires
Billionaires are agents of revolution.
Consider what they actually do. They accumulate power at a scale that makes them ungovernable by any single nation-state. They move capital, labour, and infrastructure across borders with no obligation to any particular community. They buy media organisations and shape public discourse. They fund political campaigns and bend democratic institutions toward their preferences. Some of them are now, apparently, inserting themselves into the foreign policy of sovereign governments.
This is not the behaviour of people embedded in and accountable to a social order. This is the behaviour of people who have placed themselves above the social order. And if there’s one thing Burke was clear about (whether he was writing about absolute monarchs or revolutionary committees) it’s that unchecked, unaccountable power is the enemy of the stable, rooted, free society conservatives claim to want.
The billionaire class is not a conservative phenomenon. It is, structurally, a revolutionary one.
What Burke Would Have Said
Burke defended property. But his defence of property was never simply “if you earned it, you can do whatever you like with it.” Property came bundled with responsibility. The aristocrat who owned land was expected to care for the people who lived on it, to support local institutions, to act as a steward rather than an extractor.
He coined the phrase “little platoons” to describe the intermediate institutions: family, parish, guild, neighbourhood - that give people meaning, belonging, and protection against the raw power of the state. These structures are where human beings actually form their characters and live their lives. They are what conservatism exists to protect.
Now ask yourself: what has extreme wealth concentration done to the little platoons?
Amazon has gutted the high street. Platform monopolies have replaced local newspapers with algorithmic feeds optimised for “engagement” and outrage. Private equity has bought up community hospitals, care homes, and football clubs - extracting value from them until they collapse. The towns that once had a purpose, that made things and had a civic identity, have been hollowed out not by the state, but by the market operating without the constraints of obligation or community loyalty.
Burke’s nightmare wasn’t socialism. It was a ruling class that had lost its sense of duty while retaining all of its power. He saw that in the French aristocracy before 1789, and he warned that it was a recipe for exactly the kind of violent, radical upheaval he spent his life opposing.
Inequality as a Revolutionary Accelerant
This is perhaps the most important point, and the one “conservatives” most consistently refuse to engage with.
Burke understood that revolutions don’t come from nowhere. They are produced by conditions - by accumulated grievances, by a ruling class that has become visibly corrupt and self-serving, by the growing sense among ordinary people that the system is rigged. He wasn’t naïve about this. His warning to the British establishment was essentially: deal with the legitimate grievances, or watch someone else deal with them for you, and you won’t like how they do it.
Extreme wealth inequality of the kind we now have, where eight individuals hold as much wealth as the bottom half of the global population, is precisely the kind of condition that breeds radical politics. It breeds it on the left, in the form of redistributive socialism. And increasingly, it breeds it on the right, in the form of authoritarian populism that tells dispossessed communities they’ve been betrayed by elites, and offers them a strongman in return.
A conservatism that is serious about preserving stable, free, democratic societies should be alarmed by both of those outcomes. And a conservatism that is serious about preventing them should be willing to ask hard questions about whether the current distribution of power and wealth is actually compatible with the society it claims to want.
The Distinction That Matters
I want to be careful here, because this argument is easy to misread.
This is not a case for confiscatory socialism. It is not an argument that success is bad, or that wealth is inherently corrupting, or that the state should enforce equality of outcome. Burke would have recoiled from all of those positions, and so do I.
Though I should be honest: I benefit from the system I’m criticising. I shop on Amazon. I use platforms built by billionaire-funded companies. The hypocrisy is not lost on me - but acknowledging your own contradictions is the price of admission for saying anything at all.
The distinction that matters is between rooted wealth and rootless wealth.
Rooted wealth - the successful local business owner who employs people in their community, pays taxes where they operate, invests in local institutions, and has a stake in the health of their society - is genuinely conservative. It is stabilising. It gives people a sense that hard work and enterprise produce rewards, and that the system is worth defending.
Rootless wealth - the planetary-scale fortune that floats above any particular community, answers to no electorate, pays taxes in whichever jurisdiction is most convenient, and wields power without any corresponding obligation - is not conservative in any meaningful sense. It is corrosive of exactly the things conservatism is supposed to protect.
The problem with contemporary billionaires isn’t that they have too much money. It’s that they have too little obligation.
What A Conservative Programme Might Look Like
If you take this argument seriously, a few practical implications follow - none of them particularly radical, all of them grounded in the tradition rather than the ideology.
Inheritance matters more than income. Burke was always more troubled by dynastic, inherited power than by earned success. A conservatism serious about natural aristocracy should be far more comfortable with robust inheritance taxes than it currently is. Passing a billion pounds to your children is not a conservative act. It is the creation of an aristocracy without obligation.
Monopoly power deserves scrutiny. The concentration of market power in a small number of platforms and corporations is incompatible with the plural, distributed civil society Burke valued. Breaking up monopolies is not socialism - it’s the restoration of a competitive market order in which no single actor has disproportionate structural power.
Tax residency should mean something. A billionaire who benefits from the legal system, the infrastructure, the educated workforce, and the stable institutions of a country has an obligation to that country. The conservative case for tax compliance is about reciprocity. You cannot take the benefits of a society and opt out of its obligations.
Local institutions deserve protection. Not from the state, but from the market. Communities have a right to shape the conditions under which outside capital enters them. That is sovereignty.
A Final Thought
Conservatism at its best is not the defence of the status quo. Burke knew that better than anyone - he was clear that a state without the capacity for change cannot conserve itself. What conservatism offers, at its best, is a method of change: gradual, prudent, grounded in what actually works rather than what sounds good in theory.
Applying that method honestly to the question of billionaire power leads somewhere uncomfortable for a lot of people who currently call themselves conservatives. It suggests that the defence of unlimited wealth accumulation without obligation is not conservative at all. It is, in fact, the kind of radical experiment that Burke spent his entire career warning us against.
The left opposes billionaires because of envy and equality. That’s the argument, anyway. The conservative case is different, and I’d argue it’s stronger: we oppose unchecked billionaire power because it is destabilising. Because it hollows out communities. Because it concentrates unaccountable power. Because it breeds the resentment that produces the radicalism that destroys the stable societies we actually want to live in.
Burke would have understood that immediately. He’d probably have written it better, too.
I’m not sure the modern right has caught up yet.