By Charles C. W. Cooke
Friday, March 06, 2026
Go on, get it out of the way and call me the silly names
before we begin: bootlicker, stan, fangirl. Tell me I’ll never be one
(true), that none of them know my name (probably true), and that if they did
know my name they wouldn’t like me (untrue, I’m delightful).
Good. Now, to business: The current habit of attacking
“billionaires” as some problem to be solved — and, more specifically, as the
source of all of America’s contemporary problems — is illiterate, intemperate,
ungrateful, frivolous, and, above all, dangerous.
A representative question — advanced with all the
rhetorical confidence and tragic folly of John Cleese asking,
“What have the Romans ever done for us?” — is this:
Really? Really? I suppose if you believe that the
only useful institution in our universe is the government — and, in tandem,
that you have convinced yourself that it is never adequately funded — then you
might plausibly struggle to answer this. But that’s on you. Extraneous conduct
aside, what billionaires have “contributed to society” are the things that made
them billionaires in the first instance. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Phil Knight,
Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Walt Disney — these men did not spring up from the earth,
fully formed as tremendously rich guys. They created products — computers and
phones; shoes and athletic gear; ubiquitous online shopping; retail hardware
stores; movies, TV shows, and amusement parks — that other people wanted to pay
for. Lots of people. Oodles of people. Millions of people, in fact. And
when those millions of people wanted to pay for those products, billions of
dollars changed hands. The billionaires got the money, and the buyers — some of
whom are now complaining about it — got the products. This was voluntary,
virtuous, and, in almost all cases, useful.
What of that money? Why shouldn’t we simply take it away
until its owners are no longer billionaires? Well, aside from the fact that we
have a constitution in this country, that we presumably do not wish to
discourage future innovation, and that it would be immoral to deliberately
punish Americans for their success, “it” is not configured in quite the way
that those lusting after it typically imagine. Irrespective of what one might
have seen on Duck Tales, the titans of our economy do not in fact keep
all their cash in the form of gold coins in a large vault. Most of it is
invested in stuff: their companies, other people’s companies, banks, bonds,
real estate. Take it away, and it has to be uninvested — which, in practice,
means removed from the useful things for which it’s being used, and sent to
Washington, D.C. Certainly, we could do a little bit of this without causing a
catastrophe — albeit we would make our economy weaker and more chaotic by doing
so. But, if it were achieved on the scale that the cavilers desire, we would
end up destroying the system that creates most of the existing revenue on which
our existing programs rely. If one wishes to keep eating eggs, it is unwise to kill one’s hen.
If we were to rank the problems that the United States
faces from one to one hundred, the existence of billionaires would not make the
list. Conversely, it would be pretty high up in the account of what has made
America rich, ingenious, and, frankly, better than everywhere else in the
world. “What has Elon Musk ever done for us?” You mean other than the online
payment system, and the electric cars, and the reusable rockets, and the
internet delivered by satellite, and the brain-computer interface that allows
paralyzed people to communicate with their thoughts? The very question implies
that, absent Musk’s birth, these things would necessarily have been achieved by
someone else — someone we could choose and control and loot at will. That is
untrue. Indeed, it is stupid. And all the other mistakes inherent in the
position follow inexorably on from that.
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