Like Government? Hug a Billionaire

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, July 03, 2025

 

Last week, New York City’s boy-mayor-in-waiting, 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani, indicated that the wealthy had no place in his America. “I don’t think that we should have billionaires because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality,” he told Kristen Welker on Meet the Press.

 

Of course, a central tenet of youth is to believe that one’s thoughts are unique. Irony-immune “progressives” love nothing more than to dish out ideas that failed a century ago, believing that this time will be different because a guy in an Instagram reel said so. Yet learning about how government-owned grocery stores (which Mamdani is proposing) have failed in Russia and Venezuela might require a liberal to stop making fun of Jeff Bezos’s wedding for five minutes and pick up a book. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

 

Ironically, the wealthy built the city that Mamdani will likely soon lead. Cornelius Vanderbilt did not podcast his way into the fortune that allowed him to make New York the hub of economic activity in America. Similarly, John Jacob Astor did not make New York the financial capital of America by teaching hot yoga. Had they not amassed the fortunes they did by engaging in industry, New York might simply be a midsized city between Boston and Philadelphia. (Featuring local real estate magnate Donald Trump, owner of three Tacos Bell.)

 

Back when the Republican Party contained Republicans, the ripostes to the “there are too many millionaires and billionaires” were well known. In a capitalist society, central planners have no right to calibrate the proper income for any American. Wealth among individuals creates the opportunity for others to create their own wealth. Big business begets medium-sized business, which begets small business. Those skyscrapers in New York didn’t build themselves; hard-hat-wearing, lunch-bucket-carrying guys balanced perilously on steel beams did.

 

Further, even before city towers existed, Benjamin Franklin noted that the lure of luxury gave Americans the incentive to work harder, and he argued that laws stifling personal wealth would depress ingenuity and the work ethic.

 

“Is not the hope of being one day able to purchase and enjoy luxuries a great spur to labor and industry?” Franklin asked in a 1784 letter to Benjamin Vaughn. “May not luxury, therefore, produce more than it consumes, if without such a spur people would be, as they are naturally enough inclined to be, lazy and indolent?”

 

Even 241 years ago, Franklin wasn’t afraid to mess with the Zohran.

 

And it is that untold wealth to which people aspire that funds virtually the entirety of the federal government. We all know the numbers by now: In 2022, the top 5 percent of income earners paid 61 percent of the income taxes collected, while the bottom 50 percent of wage earners paid 3 percent of the total tax load. (One surmises this is not the “inequality” to which Mamdani was referring.)

 

As for the tax rates paid by the very wealthy, the U.S. Treasury Department estimates that the top 1 percent of income earners pay a tax rate of 31 percent, while the bottom 10 to 20 percent actually pay a negative tax rate of 4.6 percent. (Their rate dips into negative territory because of the benefits they receive from the tax system.)

 

The inability of even reasonable progressives (especially those in the media) to understand this phenomenon is a national scandal. Virtually every bill that cuts taxes naturally provides an inordinate cut for wealthy taxpayers because they are the ones who pay the most in taxes. It’s the Willie Sutton line in reverse; when you give money back, you have to return it to where it came from. It is virtually impossible to give a tax cut to people who pay almost nothing.

 

Given that wealthy people actually fund the programs that progressives crave, it would seem more rational to create more billionaires than to give tax breaks to lower-level earners. More rich people means more revenue, which allows for more spending.

 

Yet Team Mamdani continues to deplore only the billionaires they don’t like. Take billionaire Taylor Swift, who, by being a global music icon, has somehow earned her money while the family that designs and manufactures toilets for American homes gets thrown on the stealing-money-from-the-poor pile. Filmmaker Tyler Perry is worth $1.4 billion, yet you’ll never see a “Medea Gets Picketed” film. Pocket revolutionaries at protests swamp social media with videos of themselves wailing about rich people while filming their tears on new iPhones. Who’s going to tell them?

 

Imagine our way of life if rich people (or people hoping to get rich) stopped innovating. People earn wealth because they create things that make our lives better and that consumers willingly agree to purchase for a certain price. Rich people sink their money into developing medicines, perfecting supply chains, and running sports franchises. We should all hope that the person who someday invents a way to turn off the sound of videos emanating from earphoneless people’s phones on public transportation becomes wealthy beyond his wildest dreams.

 

Even beyond funding the government, wealthy people prop up many of the causes progressives like. According to a recent study, people worth $30 million or more now account for 38 percent of all charitable giving in the world. The 3,200 billionaires in existence (0.00004 percent of the world’s population) account for 8 percent of all charitable giving.

 

And it often comes from an unsuspected source. Tell a liberal that Koch, Inc. has supported a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, criminal justice reform, and drug legalization, and they will look at you the way the camera operators in Boogie Nights look at Dirk Diggler the first time he unveils his “talent.”

 

Naturally, many critics of the wealthy are simply frustrated non-wealthy people. Consider the story of The Onion, the satirical newspaper founded in 1988 by a group of talented young progressives in Madison, Wisc. In a recent book about the history of The Onion, former editor Carol Kolb copped to the paper’s political bent, telling author Christine Wenc, “The Onion absolutely is political. It has a liberal agenda. A progressive agenda.”

 

But comedy writers don’t always make for great business minds (see: Twain, Mark), and after years of great work, the employees wondered where their giant payouts were. Their website had missed the dot-com bubble, and an offer to be bought by Comedy Central fell through.

 

“Sadly, it seems that the model these days if you want to be in the news business is you either have to go nonprofit or find a billionaire who likes you,” said former Onion employee Mitch Semel. Eventually, the site was sold to a hedge fund, the very type of move the paper had spent decades excoriating. (It has since been sold again, in 2024.)

 

Everyone hates a rich guy until they need one to survive.

 

If Mamdani rides his TikTok-fueled wave into the mayor’s office, the billionaires of New York may take their investments and innovations elsewhere. At that point, the young socialist will finally get schooled in economics.