Wealth inequality is one of the strongest arguments socialists have. A higher percentage of wealth is concentrated into fewer hands. Why not share that out with the rest of us?
What is wealth? Where does it come from? How did Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates end up with billions of dollars?
Jeff Bezos built Amazon. Every day I get several packages from Amazon. Amazon has been life changing; I don’t have to find a store that carries the product I need, I don’t have to drive to it, wander around aisles, stand in a checkout line, then drive home. I just point and click on what I want from home in my boxers and it magically appears.
Elon Musk provides my satellite Internet. Satellite Internet used to cost thousands of dollars a month and was slow. Elon Musk built a space exploration company that put up huge numbers of Internet satellites and now I have super fast Internet in a very rural place for a hundred dollars a month. Soon we will have satellite phones with service anywhere on the planet for cheap too. Elon has inspired humanity to once again reach for the stars with his ultra powerful spaceship the Starship.
Every day I open my computer and work on it. I have made all of my money working on my computer. I can access tools powerful beyond imagination only thirty years ago thanks to Bill Gates and his company Microsoft.
Dollars are just paper representations of favors owed or accrued. I owe all three of the men above big favors for the major improvements they have given me, and so does most of the rest of America.
But isn’t it unfair that these guys have billions of dollars and I have less? Why don’t we just take what they have and give it to ourselves?
First, remember dollars are imaginary representations of favors or power. They have no inherent worth outside of a medium of exchange. The wealth these three men have does give them the ability to live more ostentatiously than I do, but these men mostly reinvest their wealth in humanity’s future.
I would rather have these three men who have proven they have vision for the future and ability to bring about profoundly beneficial change for all of us make decisions about what billions of dollars of wealth should be invested in rather than politicians who only line their own pockets.