Add The New York Post on Google America became home to the world’s first trillionaire last month when Elon Musk’s SpaceX went public.
Musk earned his success, although he shares some measure of it with his adopted home. There’s a reason why he was able to establish the world’s largest satellite internet provider in America — a company that developed and perfected reusable booster-rocket technology and dominates the commercial spaceflight landscape — and not in Russia, China or, most inconceivably, Europe.
If Musk owes America a debt, it is only one of gratitude. But Democrats seem to believe that he owes this country much more than that. And if he’s not inclined to pay the tab Democrats believe he’s run up, they’re going to take it.
Musk’s money is really “our money,” Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts declared, citing a report on how much of SpaceX’s massive valuation is only due to its government contracts. As if federal contracts were little more than kingly beneficences that can be revoked at will.
Other Democrats didn’t even bother to look for a pretext to justify their covetousness.
“Trillionaires shouldn’t exist in a moral society,” tweeted Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts. Confiscating Musk’s wealth, irrespective of the federal government’s needs, is an ethical imperative.
Indeed, to hear the left tell it, using tax policy to punish Musk is the least America can do given its contributions to the criminally negligent policies that made him the world’s wealthiest man in the first place.
“The level of wealth that Mr. Musk has reached requires human exploitation, wage theft, wage suppression, anti-competitive markets, monopolistic control, price collusion, inadequate tax systems and corruption,” the author and progressive strategist Erica Payne insisted.
This is a child’s view of economics. These outlooks take no account of the book-value wealth Musk created not just for himself but also for his employees, several thousand of whom became overnight millionaires. Nor does it factor in the economic activity adjacent to SpaceX that contributes to the prosperity of many thousands more.
Musk’s success sparked renewed calls from Democrats for a punitive “wealth tax” akin to those in Europe. But it’s a strange time for Democrats to advocate for the importation of European-style tax policies even as Europeans themselves are abandoning them.
If they got their way, their policies would push the kind of wealth they long to appropriate for themselves out of anyone’s reach. And Europe is Exhibit A in the case against the shameful avarice that Democrats pretend is only a policy preference.
Right now, Europe is experiencing a modest crisis of self-confidence as its citizens stream into the United States for the World Cup. European visitors have given Americans a delightful view of our own country through fresh eyes, marveling over the banalities of daily life that we take for granted.
Former New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman has argued that those Europeans are cheap dates. Through his own bespoke reading of individual purchasing-power-parity statistics (his way around a strict analysis of Gross Domestic Product per capita), Krugman concludes that Europe and the United States are, by and large, economic equals.
The British magazine The Economist wasn’t buying it. “Mr. Krugman suggests a ‘walking around test,’” its reporters wrote, “if Europe is getting poor, why does it feel so pleasant?”
Well, Krugman’s critics propose their own anecdotal metric — the “driving around” America test. “American suburbia might not have a medieval town’s charm, but affluence oozes from the McMansion garages,” The Economist conceded.
Save university professors and EU bureaucrats, Europeans know there is no sugar-coating the extent to which America has eclipsed the continent. In 2024, European Central Bank president Mario Draghi warned that Europe faces the “slow agony” of economic backwardness, reduced investment and innovation, and the fragmentation of its common market. Europe, he noted, has become dangerously dependent on non-Europeans for growth and dynamism.
“Without action, we will have to either compromise our welfare, our environment, or our freedom,” Draghi warned.
Europe’s commitment to “fairness” long ago stripped it of economic vitality. At the end of 2024, the economist Andrew McAfee set out to compare big European businesses with those of America. He found that Europe could claim just 14 firms founded in the last 50 years that are worth $10 billion or more. All told, Europe’s total market cap was about $430 billion. The US, by contrast, has dozens of firms with a collective value of $30 trillion. That’s “almost 70 times as much as its EU equivalent,” McAfee wrote.
That shouldn’t surprise anyone. After all, between 2008 and 2023, Europe’s GDP grew by just 13.5% while America’s nearly doubled.
Europeans are rightfully gob-smacked by the casual displays of American affluence with which they’re surrounded. Back home, their politicians and governing institutions express nothing but contempt for the conditions that foster growth and wealth generation. For the European political class, there’s just something unseemly about creating so much value and enjoying success as a result.
Americans are not similarly tormented by their own prosperity.
America’s economic engine is a juggernaut precisely because it does not capriciously confiscate property and wealth from its most productive citizens, throwing their hard-earned income into the bottomless abyss of underfunded social welfare programs.
Democrats have long maintained that America should be more like Europe. Musk and his trillions are a testament to their failure. We should be grateful that the left’s insatiable appetite for other people’s money is matched only by their ineptitude in stealing it.
