Nathanael Blake writes for the Federalist about the left’s costly antagonism toward the wealthy.
The billionaires are not the problem, and neither is the trillionaire — but Democrats disagree.
There are incessant denunciations of billionaires from the Democrats’ Bernie Sanders wing, which has seized control of the party. Their fulminations against wealth became louder still when SpaceX going public pushed Elon Musk’s estimated net worth over $1 trillion. One congressman whined, “Trillionaires shouldn’t exist in a moral society.”
Of course, many of those making these arguments are themselves fabulously wealthy, with no intention of giving up their own millions. Nonetheless, they persist in blaming the problems of the world, the nation, and their lives on the ultra-rich. They’ve also been calculating (often erroneously) the various ways Musk’s wealth could be spent if it were just taken from him. They say we could fix society by taking from the rich to spend on the poor.
It won’t work. Democrats are incredibly wasteful with government funds. Trillions of government dollars are already spent on health care, education, and so on; a bit more is not going to make much difference. Furthermore, though Democrats tend to believe wealth comes from exploitation, that the haves are taking advantage of the have-nots, the reality is that wealth is not zero-sum. The truth is that we are naturally poor — life in the state of nature (whatever that precisely means) is nasty, brutish, and short — but wealth may be created.
And generating wealth is about more than labor. Hard work is not always very productive, which is why the subsistence farming that most of humanity engaged in for most of history didn’t make its practitioners rich. Wealth is produced by tools, techniques, and organization as much as the sweat of one’s brow. There are also legal and cultural prerequisites for wealth creation and preservation: rule of law, property rights, a high-trust society, and so on. These conditions gave us the abundance of modern life, in which, even as the rich get richer, the poor get iPhones and more calories than they need.
