Opinion: Trillionaires – John Stossel

How much money should any one person have?

When Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, people got mad.

“He will own everything!” claims a popular YouTuber. “He will own your house … your country … your government.”

Comedian Bill Maher, lately a voice of reason, asked, “Would it be crazy to have a law that said, ‘You can’t go above 1% of gross domestic product?!'”

Actually, yes. My new video explains why it would be crazy.

People who hate the very rich tend to assume that there’s a finite amount of wealth. So if Musk has a trillion dollars, everyone else must have less.

“That’s simply not true,” explains business ethics professor Chris Freiman. In a free market, businesses create new wealth, because consumers give up dollars only “because they got stuff that they valued more in return.”

Car buyers voluntarily give Musk money because he created a car they value more than other cars.

Likewise, “Steve Jobs became a billionaire, but the rest of the world got a billion iPhones,” says Freiman. Since the exchange was voluntary, “that seems like something to celebrate, not resent.”

Even Bernie Sanders understands that. Sort of.

Years ago, he said, “Nobody should earn more than one million dollars!”

But then he became a millionaire. Asked about that, he replied: “Write a bestselling book, you can be a millionaire, too!”

“If we had capped success in the past,” notes Freiman, “We probably wouldn’t have the iPhone, Netflix, DoorDash, Amazon, Spotify …”

Or robot vacuums, air fryers, Uber, Waze, etc. We are all better off thanks to the ingenuity (and often greed) of millionaires and billionaires.

No one forces us to give them money. We give it to them because they created things that we value what more than the dollars we give up.

Yet when Musk became a trillionaire, a YouTube channel with more than 2 million subscribers proposed that America “tax every penny in net worth of somebody who has over $999 million.”

That would deter people from becoming billionaires. But why is that good? Consumers are better off when Musk makes money.

No one is forced to buy his cars or satellite internet. We pay because his products are better than what we had before.

OK, it’s true that sometimes we are forced to give Musk money. But that’s because our government forces us to pay for NASA, and NASA discovered that Musk sends things into space much more efficiently than NASA ever could. Musk saves taxpayer money.

When government spends money, by contrast, I cringe.

Congress took billions of your dollars to build electric vehicle chargers. After more than three years, just 384 were open to the public.

In that same time period, Tesla built more than 35,000.

“Who is a better steward of resources?” asks Freiman. “Entrepreneurs or government officials?”

Entrepreneurs, without question, because they put their own money on the line. People spend their own money more carefully than governments spend other people’s money.

Even the greediest business faces a test government doesn’t: Consumers can say no.

I won’t defend all billionaires.

Some get rich by cheating.

Bernard Madoff stole billions by lying to investors. Sam Bankman-Fried, running the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, defrauded customers and investors.

Others, like Vladimir Putin and Fidel Castro, get rich through political power. They force people to give them money.

“I will not defend Fidel Castro,” says Freiman. When he died, his fortune was estimated at $900 million. “He got it through coercion. That’s a problem. But if you make $900 million creating and providing goods and services to people at prices, then the sky’s the limit.”

Where there is honest capitalism — riches earned without government favors (crony capitalism) — everyone is better off.

That’s the distinction critics of billionaires miss.

The important question isn’t: How much money does someone have?

It’s: How did they get it?

If they got rich through fraud, theft, coercion or government favors, prosecute the fraud, and end the favors.

If they got rich because people voluntarily buy something they created, celebrate them. They makes us richer.

I hope America has more trillionaires.