Countries With Billionaire Counts and Which Countries Have No Billionaires

Is it good or bad to have a country with billionaires?

Is an economy better without billionaires?

Is there less poverty or richer people when there are no billionaires?

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. said it is immoral to allow billionaires to exist in a society where others do not have access to healthcare.

“I do think a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong,” Ocasio-Cortez told a reporter Monday at a forum in New York honoring Martin Luther King Jr.

“I don’t think that necessarily means that all billionaires are immoral,” she added. “It is not to say that someone like Bill Gates, for example, or Warren Buffett are immoral people.”

Comparing Countries Without Billionaires and Countries With Billionaries

Here is the Wikipedia list of countries and their billionaire counts.

Sweden is cited by Cortez as a model economy. They have 31 billionaires. The countries population is about 10 million. Norway as 14 billionaires. Denmark has 6 billionaires. If Sweden has the US population and had the same ratio of billionaires then Sweden would have 960 billionaires. This would almost be a total as high as the count for the US and China combined.

Before 2000, China did not have billionaires and now China has the second most or the most billionaires depending upon the list. Pre-2000, China did not have billionaires and from 2001 onwards it had billionaires. China was vastly poorer pre-1978 and became 40 times richer over the next 40 years.

China had achieved a land without wealthy people after 1949 by stealing all of the private wealth. The exceptions being some people who escaped to Hong Kong, Taiwan and some other countries. Those people outside China became wealthier first and then helped fix China after 1978.

Hong Kong and Taiwan are richer on a per capita basis than China and did not go through the 29 year financial screw up.

In 2001, Liu Yongxong and Liu Yonghao, two brothers from Sichuan have been described as China’s first billionaires. They made a fortune in the animal feed business. The Hope Group had assets worth $1 billion in 2001. In 2009 Yonghao, was No. 4 on the list of China’s richest, with a net worth of $2.2 billion and holdings in real estate, feed and banking.

The Liu brothers’ story began in 1982, when the pawned everything they owned to raise $120 so they could start a business to buy and sell quail eggs. By the late 1980s, they had the largest quail egg business in the world. They produced 10 million quail eggs a day. On a sales trip to Shenzhen, they saw a huge line of people waiting outside a pig feedlot and realized there was big money to be made in that. The Liu brothers’ also have holdings in real estate, banking and other sectors.

In the 1950s, the Liu family of southwest China’s Sichuan Province was so short of food, they sent one of their youngest sons to be raised by another family.

All of today’s Chinese entrepreneurs trace their fortunes back to December 1978, when Deng presided over the Third Plenary session of the Communist Party and first encouraged the Chinese to get rich.

Soon after, they pooled $125 and began raising quails in Gujia. Gujia was one of the region’s most impoverished villages, located 17 miles northeast of Chengdu, the provincial capital. It had no electricity or running water and its houses were small huts constructed with mud and grass. But conditions were good enough to raise quail. If you raise quail, you don’t need much feed, says Liu Yongxing. Quails are small. And we didn’t have much land or money. Suddenly other villagers began raising quail too, and customers in bigger towns lined up to buy quail eggs. Gujia became the quail-breeding capital of China. And the Liu brothers thrived.

Before long they were among the first in the region to be honored by local Party officials as 10,000 RMB men, model socialist entrepreneurs who accumulated Chinese currency or renminbi. If you did business during the Cultural Revolution, you were the evil capitalist and you would be paraded through the street and people would throw garbage at your head, said Gao Peineng, 53, the former village chief of Gujia and a longtime friend of the Liu brothers. But in 1982, the government began honoring what they called the advanced wealth maker.

There are about 100 countries without billionaires. They tend to have broken economies and more poverty.

Ocasio-Cortez seems to be pushing the 29 failure of Mao.

Cuba has healthcare for everyone and the only two cuban billionaires live in the USA. Cuba has per capita income of about $6500 per person which is about eight times less than the $53000 per capita income of the USA.

2 thoughts on “Countries With Billionaire Counts and Which Countries Have No Billionaires”

  1. people with brains: if a country is poor then they will, by definiton, not have rich people. the wealth created by the working class, which is good, coupled with the draconian private property laws that allow a new class of feudal lords to steal that wealth from the workers, which are evil, caused the billionaires

    this random chink on the interwebz: billionaires make countries rich, despite every economist in the world disagreeing with me, and social security nets are the same as fascism, hurr durr, ching chong

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