Over the weekend I got into a spat on TV about whether billionaires are simply hoarding wealth or actually creating value that improves our standard of living — and ultimately whether they should even be allowed to exist.
I am not a billionaire (not anything close to it). I do not think all billionaires are good people. But, I’ve had enough of the online pile-on against them — whether it’s calls for violence from Hasan Piker (“let the streets soak in their f—ing red capitalist blood” is a classic); Robert Reich’s viral tweets claiming the only way to accumulate billions is through fraud, monopolies, insider trading, political cronyism or inheritance; or AOC claiming their mere existence is immoral. Villainizing billionaires fundamentally undermines the very social contract that America is built on.
The policies celebrated by the left — like California’s proposed wealth tax, which targets not just earnings but actual assets people already own — erode the foundation of civic society entirely.
Government derives its legitimacy from one source: the consent of the governed. As John Locke wrote, “The reason why men enter into society, is the preservation of their property.”
In America, that means the state protects your property rights, and in exchange, you accept its authority. If that covenant breaks down — if government stops protecting property and starts seizing it — do we even need to abide by that government?
The people clamoring for higher taxes on the rich and demanding that billionaires pay their fair share — it’s still unclear whether that means another few percentage points or 100% after a certain amount — haven’t fully explained where that money should go and who should be responsible for allocating it.
We’ve been confronted with hundreds of millions in fraud over the last year that doesn’t inspire confidence in the people currently responsible for directing the money. And even “legitimately” spent funds are often wildly ineffective — like the more than $80,000 spent on homeless people in New York last year (the homeless population is at record highs) or the $189 million that went to iPads for prisoners to watch pornography in California under Governor Newsom’s watch.
Taking more money from Elon Musk won’t fix the government incompetency that got us here in the first place, but it does undermine the innovators who have created the life-changing medicines, iPods and airplanes that make our economy the largest in the world. Our American innovation isn’t inevitable, it’s something unique that needs to be treasured and celebrated.
We should be focused on encouraging the creation of wealth and hold up people like Elon Musk as examples, not villains.
That means that sometimes others will have a lot more than we do but as Winston Churchill put it, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
