Zohran Mamdani’s Class Enemies

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, July 02, 2025

 

First, liquidate all the billionaires.

 

That’s not quite a campaign plank of Zohran Mamdani’s, but he did come out against the existence of billionaires on Meet the Press over the weekend.

 

“I don’t think we should have billionaires,” he declared, ruing how they contribute to income inequality.

 

This is an old Bernie Sanders line that doesn’t make any more sense coming from his 33-year-old socialist epigone. As aspirations go, it would be more rational to say that poor people shouldn’t exist or, alternatively, that everyone should be rich.

 

Mamdani’s anti-billionaire stance is a stupid prejudice masquerading as a moral sentiment.

 

First of all, without rich people, there’s no way he’d have any hope of paying for his socialism. Individual income taxes account for about 60 percent of revenue in New York State, and millionaires — who also contribute to inequality — pay about 40 percent of them.

 

If they are punitively taxed by a government hoping to grind them out of existence, they can move somewhere else where people speak the same language and are very welcoming to Americans — it’s called Florida.

 

Even Governor Kathy Hochul has realized this.

 

More fundamentally, people who have made fortunes in the United States are a stupendous source of wealth and creativity for society at large. Most aren’t heirs or heiresses, and they wouldn’t have made so much money if they didn’t contribute something that others found valuable.

 

For instance, when you have seven tech companies with a combined market value that roughly matches the combined GDP of the four largest European economies, some people are going to get very rich.

 

The valuation of the leading tech companies in Europe is negligible in comparison. Are we supposed to believe that this is better for Europe because tech entrepreneurs aren’t contributing to wealth inequality there? Europe, which is always working on plans and issuing reports on how it can catch up, apparently doesn’t think so.

 

By the same token, should we be worried that the United States might win the artificial intelligence race and that a new group of innovators might become extremely wealthy?

 

It’s not as though the revenues generated by successful enterprises are stuffed under a gigantic mattress somewhere. They are devoted to what, in a different context, is a favorite word of the left, “investment.” Again, looking at the seven top tech firms, they devote hundreds of billions of dollars a year to capital expenditures and research and development.

 

By any reasonable standard, that’s a boon to American society.

 

It’s a fantasy to believe that the same wealth-generating process, with all its attendant benefits, would take place under a regime hostile to wealth as such.

 

Another fallacy is Mamdani’s assumption that the very existence of billionaires is bad for everyone else, especially the poor. The fact is that New York’s estimated 120 billionaires could vaporize and move somewhere else, and New York’s neighborhoods wouldn’t be any safer or more affordable for ordinary New Yorkers.

 

If these arguments in response to Mamdani seem familiar, it’s because there’s nothing new about identifying class enemies, or about any other of the youthful mayoral candidate’s terrible ideas.