Billionaires Rock
We ought to build statues of them, not chase them from state to state.
By Kyle Smith
Before Amazon came along, ordering anything by mail ordinarily meant waiting six to eight weeks for delivery. Today, for a trivial fee, not only will Amazon bring virtually anything to you with astonishing alacrity, but the final cost of the goods is comparable to, sometimes even less than, the best price you can find at a retailer near your home. During the pandemic, when we were all afraid of crowds, it kept us all going with anything we needed. Thanks, Jeff Bezos.
Before Google, searching for something on the internet was like trying to shop in an unlit supermarket that shelved its products in random order. Thanks, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
Before Tesla, the electric car barely existed. Thanks, Elon Musk. And thanks again for turning Twitter into a place where we can share opinions that don’t conform to progressive orthodoxy, or accurate information about Hunter Biden.
Denounced, despised and disrespected, there is a class of people who keep devising new ways to make life better, yet in the Upside Down where our intelligentsia and also Elizabeth Warren live, the mobs are lighting their torches and giving their snarl muscles a workout. Our greatest billionaires ought to have statues placed in public squares. Their stories ought to be taught to children as parables of inspiration.
Billionaires rock. They’re great even when you don’t calculate what they contribute to the public weal, which is a lot. Add up the tax and the philanthropy, and the citizenry gets 59% of what billionaires earn, or 73% if you follow their fortunes into death. Estimates that billionaires pay lower tax rates than everyone else rest on distortions, tricks and lies. Merely living amid billionaires has pretty dazzling effects when you’re in a place like New York or Los Angeles, where plutocratic munificence builds beautiful things such as museums and performing-arts centers.
It’s a quirk of American political thought that we revere rich athletes and entertainers, whose talents are on very public display and can hardly be dismissed. Yet when it comes to billionaires, whose skills are often exercised in invisible ways, many of us grow beady-eyed and wary. The big difference between LeBron James and Bill Gates is apparent, though: Mr. James never did anything for you except be entertaining. Mr. Gates, whose operating system made the consumer-friendly desktop a staple of the American home and office, measurably improved your life.
From coast to coast, the most successful Americans are under attack. New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani is crowing about an unspecified “pied-à-terre tax” targeting the folks who own high-end property here but don’t even consume the normal amount of public services because they live elsewhere. California progressives are trying to push through a cash grab of 5% of billionaires’ net worth.
Billionaire discourse often becomes a Trojan horse for going after much less wealthy Americans. Maine just upped its income tax from 7.15% to 9.15% for earnings above $1 million (or $1.5 million for joint filers). Massachusetts passed a 4% surtax on million-dollar earners. Washington State is now taxing incomes over $1 million at 9.9%.
In the other Washington, the minions of Sen. Warren now number around 50 lawmakers backing her chuckleheaded “ultramillionaire tax,” which is a nakedly unconstitutional seizure of wealth. We’re getting near the point where wealthy people are going to get chased around the country like 19th-century Mormons.
A swath of the public reacts with cross-eyed rage to billionaires’ mere existence, fulminating that they cheated or that they’re “hoarding” wealth. The first charge hardly ever intersects with reality and the second is preposterous fantasy.
The usually evidence-free grumbling about “cheating” is linked to both our contemporary cynical attitude that the real story must always be much more sordid than what we’ve been taught and the kindergarten-Marxist suspicion that if laborers sweat more than factory owners, something must be wrong if the owners are the ones getting rich. “Behind every great fortune there is a crime,” a phrase attributed to Balzac but popularized by Mario Puzo (who streamlined the much wordier original remark) when he used it at the outset of his novel “The Godfather,” is supposedly the savvier take. What crime underlies the success of Microsoft, or for that matter, Tesla? Obtaining federal subsidies (as Tesla did) may be distasteful rent-seeking, but every business is entitled to jawbone the government to seek advantage; blame the lawmakers who fall for the pitch.
“Hoarding,” a favorite term among lefty pundits who obsess over the “share of wealth” that is “controlled” by the rich, is a conceptual error that positions lucre as a sort of Aladdin’s cave to which lucky people somehow finagled access. But Mark Zuckerberg didn’t find his wealth; he created it, by making a product people loved to use. In the process, he made many others wealthy—employees, investors, shareholders—and has pledged to spend 99% of his lifetime fortune on public benefits such as curing diseases.
Wealth creators such as Mr. Zuckerberg have, in effect, built rather than discovered Aladdin’s cave, many times over, and allowed a lot of others to come in. Elizabeth Warren shouldn’t only stop raging about him; she should volunteer to clean his sneakers and iron his hoodies.
Mr. Smith is a Free Expression columnist at WSJ Opinion.
What are Bezos and Zuckerberg supposed to have contributed to society?
It’s true that Amazon improved access to shopping and reduced costs, especially distribution costs. But all the other consequences — monopoly power, destruction of local commerce, concentration of wealth — benefit only him, not society. And I don’t see the overall balance tipping in society’s favor.
As for Zuckerberg’s empire, I only see harm.
Yet many of these billionaires that the leftist crackpots like granny Warren with her 12 millions want to destroy, get funded by these billionaires. It really is inexplicable how the billionaires seem to be captured by the democrat islamocommies.