Anytime you see a number with a bazillion zeroes after it, you have to wonder if that could possibly represent anything real. Sure, if it’s stars in the sky, or bacteria in your bowel. Those number in the trillions. But say somebody is, oh, let’s say, “worth” hundreds of billions of dollars. What could that possibly mean? Does it mean you would fork over that much to possess him? Does it mean that person has done something of that much value to the world? I’m kidding. Clearly it does not mean that.

We could suggest people of genuine worth. Jonas Salk? Thanks to him and Albert Sabin, polio was nearly eradicated from the globe. Gone. Poof. Nearly, but now that we know vaccines are a hoax, and now that we know our efforts to advance world health are a waste of taxpayer money, that little virus is due for a comeback. Anyway, neither Salk nor Sabin was worth much, by today’s standards.

They could have been. But both men declined to patent their vaccines so that more people could acquire it and the scourge of polio might be eliminated. It almost was.

I was six when I got my first polio vaccine, and I remember it well. The very air was freighted with the ardent yet unarticulated emotion of my father, who was leading his last two children into the doctor’s office to keep them safe from the fate of his second child: my spectacular, flaming-red rocket of a sister, Margaret. She of the humped spine and a life of pain she burdened no one with.

Both Salk and Sabin could have died billionaires if they had sought a patent.

They’d be dead billionaires.

That’s what every billionaire becomes.

It is tempting, and not out of the question, to imagine that the good virologists were naturally civic-minded, and had a true notion of the worth of their work, and themselves, and were never tempted to capitalize on their inventions beyond the rewards of their employment and their legacies. In fact, they probably were. They knew their true value. They knew what a difference they were making.

But it is also true that they were living at a time when their incomes, above $400,000, would have been taxed at a 91% rate. Which would leave them plenty enough. Nine percent of a billion is still plenty of money; most people could make ends meet with it. But in the 1950s the quaint notion of the value of the commons was baked right into our tax code.

That alone wouldn’t guarantee an altruistic attitude. Salk and Sabin could certainly have cashed in.

But things have changed; we’ve rewritten the amassing of great wealth as a desirable pursuit, instead of the clear human failure that it is. The culture has changed since Ronald Reagan began to dismantle the old tax structure and advance the financial sector and our money sailed to the top. Even now, ordinary people are inclined to assign virtue to the very wealthy. We all (it is said) want to be rich. Those who are rich must have earned it!

So we spare the fragile darlings the unspeakable humiliation of having to contribute to the society that elevated them. We’ll protect their spawn too. This, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that there is no relationship between wealth and actual, human worth.

We support people said to be “worth” billions because they share genetic material with Sam Walton, who founded an enterprise that systematically demolished thousands of businesses worldwide. We lift up Jeff Bezos, who is doing the same thing. We applaud those who manipulate markets, tank companies, shred jobs. We admire those lords of the extraction industries who destroy our living environment, who profit off modern slavery, who undermine (or kill) democratically elected leaders who get in their way.

How can the notion of being “worth” a billion dollars apply to someone clearly lacking in every conceivable measure of human value?

We glorify him. We envy him. We agree his blessed treasure should be protected. Meanwhile, all any of us needs is enough. And if we all had enough, we’d have something the billionaires never will.

What is your child worth? What is the child of a dead billionaire worth? Should be the same. Isn’t.