By John R. Puri
Monday, June 15, 2026
My colleague Charlie Cooke likes to point out an eerie
pattern among Democratic politicians: Progressives tend to “download” an
identical new position or talking point in unison, as if receiving a software
update to their programmed ideology, while acting as if it’s the most obvious
and eternal truth in the world. Their latest patch has Democrats turning their
scowls, in one synchronized sweep, toward America’s wealthy.
Suddenly, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are
headlining the “Fighting
Oligarchy Tour.” Support for a wealth tax is a litmus test for presidential hopefuls. Blue states are jacking up their top marginal tax rates. Insurgent
candidates like Zohran Mamdani and Graham Platner are surging to primary
success on platforms of white-hot rage against rich people and corporations,
who they allege have rigged the U.S. economy. Mainstream Democrats have embraced their rhetoric. The
progressive-activist class is genuinely enthused for the first time in a while
— to defeat Republicans, sure, but even more so to grind the wealthy into the
dust.
There is nothing worse you can be in Democratic politics
right now than a billionaire. Unless, of course, you’re a trillionaire.
On Friday, Elon Musk was minted as the world’s first
trillionaire when the cutting-edge technology company he runs and largely owns,
SpaceX, opened its shares to public investors at a current valuation of $2.1
trillion. Progressives were apoplectic. They flocked to the social media site X
(without noticing the irony of who provides them with this service) to denounce
Musk’s very existence.
Billionaires, let alone trillionaires, they declared,
could not exist unless they swindled their wealth from the public. Musk didn’t
earn his wealth, don’t you know? It was actually
created by the government, so the public has a rightful claim to take it
back. If only Musk’s money could be absorbed by the state, it could
pay for everything good and just for mankind, instead of whatever useless
“innovation” (reusable space rockets, high-speed satellite internet that
blankets the earth) Musk is keeping
his capital locked away in.
For anyone who knows the slightest thing about wealth, it
need not be said that all this is nonsense. Elon Musk is the richest man in the
world not because he pillaged wealth, but because he has produced far more
economic value than anyone else. When the government has paid for a company’s
service — a NASA rocket launch, for example — that does not mean it has
produced the resulting wealth any more than it means grocery shoppers produce
orange juice. And, most basic of all, Musk does not have a trillion dollars
sitting in a vault. His wealth is not in cash that can be spent with a debit
card. Mostly, his wealth consists of the physical activity of sending starships
and satellites into outer space.
Economic illiteracy is not unusual for progressives.
What’s interesting, however, is that Democrats think they have a winning
political message in their war against wealth. Attacking billionaires, they
believe, is the way to win the hearts of voters who despise this economy. Is it a smart play?
Most Americans Have Other Concerns
This isn’t the first time Democrats have lined up to
endorse taxing the rich. During the presidential primaries in 2019, when the
economy was humming along nicely, virtually every candidate advocated
raising taxes on high earners and corporations. Several supported a federal
wealth tax. But these proposals were presented in service of the field’s main
agenda: a laundry list of new entitlements to health care, childcare, college
“education,” etc.
Things are different today. Democrats’ anti-wealth animus
is self-supporting; pure class envy is the point. What the money from
new taxes will go toward funding is an afterthought.
Presumably, the party believes that Americans would not
just like to seize billionaires’ wealth for this or that government program.
Rather, they simply want billionaires to not exist. That’s what all this
economic doom and gloom is really about, right? If billionaires’ wealth
magically evaporated, or if corporate ownership were less concentrated, people
would rejoice.
It’s an odd theory, given that the economic discontents
of most voters have nothing whatsoever to do with billionaires. Americans are
worried instead about things that normal people care about. They want the things they buy to cost less, or at least for
them not to cost so much more year after year. They are probably displeased
that consumer prices have risen more than workers’ average earnings over the past
half decade — for some, by quite a lot. Households aren’t in love with their record-high
debt.
Say that every penny’s worth of value owned by U.S.
billionaires disappeared. It would help precisely no one. Nobody else’s income
would be any higher; no one’s cost of living would be any lower. We know this
in part because, between Friday morning and that evening, no one was made any
worse off by Elon Musk’s becoming a trillionaire. Hundreds of billions of
dollars of wealth were created — or, more accurately, existing wealth was
recognized at a higher valuation — and, unless you were following the news, you
didn’t notice. If SpaceX’s stock collapsed today and Musk was no longer a
trillionaire, there would be many financial losers, but no winners.
Why are Democratic politicians so obsessed with
billionaires, then? Because their base electorates share the obsession, even if
few others do.
As part of a project for my last college quarter, I wrote
a section of a nationally representative survey conducted by More in Common, a
nonprofit polling agency. With two questions, I sought to identify Americans’
principal economic concerns and policy priorities. In the first question, I
asked whether respondents’ greatest obstacle to their financial well-being was
the high cost of living, a lack of good-paying jobs, or an “unfair economic
system that privileges certain groups over others.” In the second, I asked
whether respondents thought the government’s priority should be reducing costs,
creating jobs, or “reducing inequality between the richest and poorest
Americans.”
The results showed that about 20 percent of Americans are
primarily concerned with structural unfairness or inequality, far behind the
cost of living and job creation. Unsurprisingly, this group was driven by those
who described themselves as liberal. For the largest ideological group —
self-described moderates, whom Democrats must persuade in general elections —
inequality was a distant third priority at 19 percent of respondents, after
reducing costs (53 percent) and job creation (28 percent). Gallup polling backs up my findings: Just 3 percent of
Americans say the “gap between rich and poor” is the country’s top problem.
Progressives are down the rabbit hole on wealth
distribution. They are increasingly conspiratorial on the matter, insisting
that billionaires are inflicting pain despite offering no logical thread
between some people’s wealth and everyone else’s living standards. Such a
connection does exist, but in the opposite direction to what progressives
claim: One’s lofty net worth is usually evidence of immense value creation for
other people.
Adjacent to the grassroots-led hatred of billionaires is
an equally confounding trend among progressive intellectuals furious at
corporate bigness. The Atlantic reported on this “antitrust theory of
everything,” popularized by left-wing think tanker Barry C. Lynn:
Lynn is the
intellectual godfather of what is now known as the neo-Brandeisian movement,
which identifies corporate consolidation as the singular, villainous force
behind everything that has gone wrong in the United States. “It is vital to
understand,” Lynn wrote in his 2020 book, Liberty from All Masters,
“that monopoly is not one of many economics problems but rather the
political economic problem of our time,” causing “just about every ill in our
society today.”
When he says that
he holds corporate consolidation responsible for just about every problem,
he means it. A list of social ills Lynn has attributed to monopolists includes
not just the cost of goods and services but also: “The vast and growing
inequality of wealth, political power, and control. The rise of the radical
right. The surge in racism and homophobia. The attacks on reproductive choice
and marriage. The collapse of our news media.”
Like the trillionaire commentary, this is lunacy. And
politically foolish, because most Americans know that companies like Amazon and
Google are not the source of their financial strain. Believe it or not, they
appreciate the corporations that offer free shipping and free web products.
If the Democrats’ anti-wealth crusade were a sound
political ploy, it might be minimally respectable. But it’s not. It is just
progressive fan service that strikes nearly everyone outside the party as
irrelevant to real economic problems at best, and a bizarre derangement at
worst.
ADDENDUM: Americans should cheer SpaceX’s initial
public offering because it means they can nab a stake in a breathtaking firm.
We can call that popular ownership of the means of production — no socialism
required.
Sadly, most people did not get a chance to invest in
SpaceX before last week because it was funded entirely through private capital.
Many other firms have taken the same path: The number of publicly listed
companies has fallen sharply since the dot-com boom.
One positive reason for this trend is that the federal
government deregulated the process of raising private capital in the 1990s,
reducing the relative cost of remaining private. Years later, however, Congress
increased regulation of public securities after a series of
accounting scandals. The aim of this policy divergence was to protect
unsophisticated stock-pickers from fraud, but researchers have found that the unintended consequence was
to block retail investors’ access to many successful companies for longer
periods. If progressives wish to spread corporate wealth to more hands, they
should work to make it easier for regular people to buy in.
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