When an individual earns a billion dollars, they are legally killed by society and their wealth redistributed*. This killing is televised: a SWAT team with go-pros enters the palatial residence, or chandeliered bunker, or mahogany-clad private jet, and puts a bullet to the offending billionaire.
In 1982 a terrible film called Logan’s Run was released. The central premise to this science fiction 
movie: at the age of thirty, citizens are killed by the government. They die willingly, believing it for the good of society, and that they’d have a small chance of living forever (yes, they were brainwashed). The few who try to avoid this death are called runners.
The rationale behind death at the age of thirty: a mechanism to control population and the over-consumption of scarce resources.
Sound familiar? The human race currently consumes its entire carbon budget for the year, by August each year. That is, each year we push our planet further towards the climatic tipping point, after which environmental Armageddon looms. We’re doomed, simply because we can’t stop making and buying stupid shit.
So as the great humanitarian, Vladimir Lenin, pondered: what is to be done?
The problem with the Logan’s Run solution is having to kill everyone as they get older. In this scenario, the hard rain of the Grim Reaper falls on the good and the bad alike. Aside from the ethics of it, killing on this scale would be impractical to implement, and require world-wide brainwashing of a type only available in the most feverish hate-dreams of Rupert Murdoch.
Thus, and speaking of which, I give you Rupert’s Run.
Listen:
Billionaires – well, there’s only 1,826 of those. Taking out 1800 people, globally? Piece of cake. More 
people die through autoerotic asphyxiation every year. Yes, that’s right. More people die jerking off with a rope around their neck. Hell, Hippos in Africa alone kill nearly 3000 people a year, and I don’t hear anyone freaking out about that.
So there’s your implementation problem solved. It also solves your ethics problem, because, well, billionaires are bad people. Hideously bad. Evil personified. A poop in the salsa.
The 1800 billionaires in the world now hold a staggering combined net worth of 7.1 trillion dollars, and every year that figure grows. If billionaires were a country, they’d be the fourth richest in the world. Just the top 62 billionaires own as much wealth as the poorest 50% of the world’s population. The tax alone owed by the world’s billionaires, from the money they’ve hidden in tax havens, would raise an additional 190 billion each year. Oxfam has estimated that 30% of all African wealth is held off-shore.
As noted by arch conservative economic institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, social unrest and wars increase as inequality increases. Massive inequality is also bad for economic growth.
To emphasise: only 1800 would need to die in the first year. Every year after that, it’d be a handful – say half a dozen (less than the number of people killed each year by vending machines), but fortuitously, enough to keep Rupert’s Run with material to stay on the air.
A collateral policy of Rupert’s Run is the carpet bombing of tax havens. This will only be required once or twice. For example, you’d reduce Cayman Islands to ash shifting in the breeze, thereby eliminating those money-laundering enablers of planet-destroying greed.
Though I wouldn’t go the Caymans. My choice would be that treacherous hive of scum and villainy: Luxembourg. The half-million pissants of that boiled potato-eating, tax-dodging, justice-destroying little legislature in the middle of Europe will finally get the comeuppance, courtesy of several million tonnes of dumb bombs dumped on their carbohydrate-fattened arses.
After this, the other tax-havens will quickly fall into line.
The downside of killing billionaires and the Luxembourgeoisie would be hand-wringing by earnest liberals and unbridled outrage by the oligarchs. The upside would be saving the planet.
Yes, saving the planet. Gone would be the Koch Brothers, their funding for anti-science conspiracy theories and the Tea Party.
Yes, gone would be Rupert Murdoch, the Vampire Count of global mass media, his hate-spewing praetorians bereft of their dark lord.
Gone would be the kleptocrats of China and Russia.
Gone would be the Australian mining magnates, funnelling money into their anti-climate campaigns.
All gone, except *Elon Musk.
You see, the exception to the Rupert’s Run policy is the Elon Musk Dictum. If an individual’s wealth is dedicated solely to exploration of space, and to radically transforming a fossil-fuel dominated 
industry to one that is environmentally friendly (i.e. electric cars, or solar batteries), they are exempted. The effect of this will be to corral the most powerful and greedy towards activities that help the planet and further human knowledge.
But for those that fail to change: gone.
In their place, we will have universal health and education – for the planet. A carbon negative global economy, colonies on Mars and the Moon. Democracy will flourish, news networks return to fact and science-based reporting, public coffers will fill, austerity policies cease to exist, and regular citizens be paid a living wage.
Donald Trump would no longer be president of the US of A, but the star of the most popular ever re-
run of Rupert’s Run. Imagine: Bernie Sanders leading a mob of baseball-bat wielding homeless who lost their houses in the GFC, right into the penthouse of Trump Towers.
We would have, in a word: utopia. Well, maybe not quite. I don’t think the Kardashians are billionaires. But we would, without question, avoid the climate change dystopia we are currently headed towards at breakneck speed. And that’s a start.
A fantasy, sure. It’s satire (of course). But in the words of Slavoj Žižek: “it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.”
Isn’t it easier to imagine shooting a thousand filthy rich people, than destroying the planet? The sad truth is: no – it’s easier to envisage the end of civilisation. The fact that most of those filthy rich will also die when civilisation dies doesn’t seem to matter, when it comes to our collective imaginations.
The truth is we don’t even need to kill 1800. The fact is most will either divest, or radically change the way they invest. Most. Not all. Never fear – the first season of Rupert’s Run will be chock-full of memorable moments.
Everyone wins: capitalism changes, the greediest are weeded out, the planet is saved.
And we’re all thoroughly entertained in the process.
