I Could Give You a Billion Reasons |
Decimal envy has multimillionaire “socialists” demanding a ban on billionaire capitalists.
Let’s imagine a fellow who has a bad rash on his arms. He goes to two doctors. The first prescribes a cream that makes the rash generally disappear and reduces that itchy feeling. If the patient stops using the cream, the rash comes back with a vengeance. The second doctor tries to figure out life changes and zeroes in on a modified diet. When the offending food type is removed, the rash disappears forever. The patient is cured.
For about a decade, faux socialists like Bernie Sanders, Chief Liz Warren, AOC, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani have demanded the end of billionaires. How can people have so much money when there is so much poverty? Let’s tax them until they’re only as rich as we are! As most astute observers have noted, even if one taxed all of the U.S. billionaires aggressively, their combined contributions wouldn’t keep the government’s lights on for more than a few days. Even though most U.S. billionaires are Democrats, some key figures like Elon Musk break Republican. The problem for our math-challenged politicians is that they don’t understand what being a billionaire means.
While there are some billionaires who inherited their fortunes and did not exactly “earn” them through their own efforts, their parents and other billionaires reached their status generally for one simple reason: they offered society products or solutions that millions or more people have paid to use or obtain. Look at the names of American billionaires and you can automatically associate them with their companies. And while some billionaires can be super-annoying with their giga-yachts and dumb political views, in the end, they got rich because we bought things that they offered. In almost all cases, nobody forced us to buy their products, and we had every right to buy someone else’s goods or buy nothing at all. When I see a billionaire, I think of the thousands or........