Across the country today, thousands are taking to the streets under the banner of Workers Over Billionaires. From Chicago’s Haymarket Memorial to courthouse steps in Michigan, the message is unmistakable: ordinary people are furious that so much power over decision-making in this country belongs to billionaires. Their frustration isn’t just with inequality, it’s with the tactics billionaires use to shape policy, from lobbying and campaign funding to corporate consolidation and tax avoidance.

But there’s a deeper truth beneath the chants and signs, one that challenges the very story we’ve been told about billionaires. For decades, the public has been sold the myth that billionaires are the ultimate proof of capitalism’s success, that they are “job creators” whose wealth is somehow tied to the prosperity of all. The reality is almost the opposite.

Capitalism Doesn’t Require Billionaires

Capitalism, at its core, is driven by markets. Exchanges between buyers and sellers. Jobs exist because people need goods and services, not because a billionaire benevolently “creates” them. Consumers dictate demand, and businesses respond. That mechanism works with or without billionaires.

In fact, billionaires aren’t products of capitalism so much as they are distortions of it. True capitalism depends on circulation: money flowing through wages, spending, taxes, and reinvestment. Hoarded wealth doesn’t fuel growth; it freezes it.

The Job Creation Myth

The billionaire as “job creator” is one of the most effective PR campaigns of the modern age. But look closer: it’s not billionaires who generate employment, it’s consumer demand. A store doesn’t hire workers because a billionaire owns it – it hires because customers walk in. A factory doesn’t expand because its CEO is rich – it expands because people buy more of what it makes.

The majority of jobs are sustained by small and mid-sized businesses, not billionaires. When wealth concentrates at the very top, it actually undermines that job creation cycle by pulling money out of circulation.

Billionaires as a Cancer on Capitalism

If capitalism is a living body, billionaires function less like organs and more like tumors. Instead of keeping the system healthy, they extract resources and hoard them in a way the market was never meant to support. Worse, they use their outsized wealth to alter the rules… funding lobbyists, rewriting tax codes, and tilting the playing field until the market no longer responds to consumers but to them.

That isn’t capitalism. It’s oligarchy wearing capitalism’s mask.

Chesapeake, Virginia: Anger on the Ground

The protests aren’t just abstract. In Chesapeake, Virginia, a crowd gathered at the intersection of Battlefield Boulevard and Volvo Parkway, holding hand-painted signs that cut to the heart of the issue.

“Better benefits for workers – no tax breaks for billionaires.”
“Support workers, not billionaires.”
“Impeach. Convict. Remove.”
And a simple command lifted high above the traffic: “RESIST.”

Palestinian, American, Virginian, and rainbow flags waved side by side, each symbol linking local frustrations to global struggles for justice. Some signs denounced ICE, others targeted corporate greed, but the common thread was unmistakable: anger that billionaires not only hoard wealth but wield it to shape every corner of public life.

The Choice in Front of Us

Today’s protests aren’t just about wages or pensions. They’re about reclaiming the idea that capitalism is supposed to work for everyone. If wealth is meant to circulate, if markets are meant to reflect demand, then billionaires don’t strengthen capitalism; they suffocate it.

The people who stood on a street corner in Chesapeake this weekend weren’t waiting for a savior. They were making it clear: the billionaire class may have the money, but they don’t have the final word.

The question, then, isn’t whether we can afford to challenge billionaires. It’s whether we can afford not to; if we want a system that serves the many instead of celebrating the few who undermine it.