Yes, AOC, billionaires earned their wealth

There’s zero evidence that the war of independence was driven by any class resentment, much less progressive hobby horses like “wealth disparity.” The American Revolution couldn’t have happened without the “billionaires of their time,” who were relied on and lauded.

George Washington was one of the wealthiest men and biggest landowners in the colonies. Robert Morris, perhaps the wealthiest man on the continent, spent a considerable amount of his fortune funding the war. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Hancock, and numerous others were all members of the wealthy elite. Per capita, the citizens of the 13 British colonies in North America were likely the richest people in the world when the Declaration of Independence was written.

Ocasio-Cortez is probably thrown by the word “revolution,” an appealing concept for progressive leftists, though probably a misnomer when it comes to the war of independence. Or perhaps she’s confusing our fight with the French Revolution, which is more her speed ideologically.

One of the catalysts for war against Britain was the issue of taxation being levied by a far-off government. And one of the most cherished ideals of the American patriot was property rights.

“The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God,” John Adams wrote on the topic of a majority taking property from a wealthier minority, “and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If ‘Thou shalt not covet,’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free.”

Yet, the endless socialist grousing about “oligarchs” and parasitic billionaires and millionaires who allegedly fail to pay taxes is meant to push the issue of redistribution. It is basically the entirety of the progressive left’s economic arguments these days.

“You can get market power. You can break rules,” she told the comedian Ilana Glazer recently. “You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that, right? And so you have to create a myth… you have to create a myth of earning it.”

Ocasio-Cortez, whether she’s aware of it or not, is simply repeating Karl Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value, which contends that the rich can’t earn their wealth, only steal it through the exploitation of workers. The laborer, according to Marx, produces more value than he receives in wages from the greedy bourgeois capitalist, who just pockets the difference. This is basically how the American progressive believes profit is generated, as well.

This is a complete misunderstanding of how an economy works. We know that the poor don’t get poorer when the rich get richer. The wealthier per capita income is for most people, the higher the per capita of billionaires in a nation.

Yet, like communism itself, the zero-sum fallacy of economics is virtually impossible to extinguish. Every generation of socialist, no matter how often their ideas are debunked by reality, can tap into the irrational resentments and emotions of a mob.

Most of your favorite big companies wouldn’t exist if politicians and technocrats were destroying wealth. Billionaires, especially the ones progressives detest — Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, but not George Soros and son or Laurene Powell Jobs — were able to scale successful ideas to generate huge profits. But even if billionaires hadn’t “earned” their fortunes, and some are lucky enough to inherit them, most do a far better job of allocating money to productive sectors of society than a risk-averse government captured by fleeting political or ideological considerations or ever could.

Bezos, for instance, created an enormously popular company by exploiting an emerging market: online sales. The company mails anything I want to me in a day or two. For those who grew up with this luxury, it probably means little. But Amazon has saved consumers billions of dollars since its inception. It employs over 1 million people in the United States, and most of them have health insurance coverage. Since its IPO in 1997, Amazon has created around $3 trillion of wealth for shareholders, which includes pension funds, mutual funds, and retiree accounts.

But the contention that capitalistic wealth accumulation isn’t real or ill-gotten is foundational to socialism. Without it, there’s little justification for the state to seize one person’s property and hand it to another.

Of course, if billionaires “break the rules” to amass their fortunes, they should be penalized. For the most part, this isn’t reality, however. In progressive-speak, “breaking the rules” simply means billionaires aren’t playing by the rules that left-wingers wish they could implement but have not been able to.

Is life fair? No. You often hear people lament the injustice of a professional athlete earning unfathomably more money than a teacher or fireman who lives paycheck to paycheck. But elite athletes have highly unique skills that help generate massive revenues that sustain thousands of jobs. Teachers are vital to society, of course, but many people can do the job. (Though teaching does offer an excellent example of how state-run institutions disincentivize innovation and public-sector unions undermine competition and depress the salaries of good teachers.)

The same goes for CEOs of big corporations. Most often, they’ve gained the skills that allow them to oversee massive investments and make huge decisions affecting thousands of employees and millions of shareholders. They are hired and fired by boards that are invested in the company’s success.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember, however, is that while Bezos, Gates, or Musk might not have made their money in a way that satisfies a Marxist, none of Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), or taxpayers had anything to do with earning it — it is not their money to take. Having a federal government seize and redistribute the property of Americans for being too successful is antithetical to the tenets of the founding, not to mention economic sense.