Haters’ “Justice”
Suppose you have an idea for a business. That idea needs a bit of start-up cash. You currently have a decent job, and earn enough to actually pay a decent bit in income taxes. You own a home, and as a result, you have mortgage interest and property taxes that you can deduct come tax return time. Those deductions recoup some of your income tax liability, and that leaves you with enough cash to start up that business.
A few years or a couple decades later, your business is a monster success. You’re now a millionaire, many times over.
Someone comes along and says “Hey! You took advantage of the system, now we are entitled to a piece of the wealth you created!!”
Does that sound proper to you?
You played by the rules someone else wrote. You paid what they demanded, you availed yourself of what the law allowed.
Try it a different way.
You borrow that start-up cash, agreeing to repay the borrowed amount under certain terms (interest rate, time). You repay that cash under those terms, and your business becomes a monster success.
Does the lender have any right to lay claim to a piece of your business beyond the repaid loan?
Try it a third way.
Some person or group of persons is out there, offering up cash for good ideas. The terms of that offer are made clear at the time of the offer. You take some of the cash, fulfill the original terms eventually, and your interaction is done.
Does that person or group have any right to say “wait, you struck it super-rich thanks to that initial infusion. We want more, now.”
Would any sane person say that demand is reasonable?
Yet that is exactly what our Leftist politicians are doing when they screech about Elon Musk’s trillion dollar milestone and their demands for instituting a wealth tax.
With the SpaceX IPO, Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. Simultaneously, 4400 current and former SpaceX employees became millionaires, 400 of them hitting the centimillionaire plateau. One meme making the rounds points out that Musk just created several thousand millionaires, while Bernie Sanders only ever created one - himself.
There is no reason to hate Musk for being successful. If you are vexed by whatever cronyism and rent-seeking he might have engaged in along the way, point your ire at the politicians who gave it to him, and then at the voters who elected the politicans who gave it to him. As the cliche goes, don’t hate the player, and he is far, far, FAR from the most egregious example of rent-seeking industrialist out there. His achievements are benefiting the world far more than any big-government politician’s ever have.
I think this trillionaire milestone is a wonderful social media moment. Take note how your friends react. Those who celebrate “get it.” Those who scream about the injustice and the good that could be done if the government took that money are nothing more than envious destroyers.
Yes, there’s plenty to criticize in Musk’s actions, professional and personal. That is always going to be the case, no matter who you’re looking at. He is, after all, a human being, and none of us are bestowed with the wisdom of Solomon. I suggest this is not the moment to do so. This is a time to celebrate achievement and deny the haters, the takers, the destroyers, and all the other envy-driven people their sour grapes.
I also suggest that a fair bit of what we “know” about Musk is media construct. Who are the good guys in society, from your or my perspective? Who are the bad guys? How much of that perspective is based on what we’ve been fed by gatekeepers and taste-makers? How much of our perception has been shifted by curators, by others’ biases and opinion-shifted reporting? Musk has disclosed he has Aspergers, which inevitably detriments how he presents publicly. Combine that with his mortal sin of liberating Twitter from the Left’s iron grip, and the long knives have been out for him for years. I’m not offering excuses (or ****ing his ****s, as one Facebook ninny suggested). I simply recognize that what matters more is what he’s accomplished. That’s what will persist after he’s in a box in the ground or ashes scattered somewhere.
The market has spoken. The collective... whatever you want to call it has valued Musk’s companies at a level that makes his shares in those companies worth a trillion dollars. He was not gifted a vault full of gold that he gets to swim in. Instead, SpaceX, the company, received $75B in cash. The company now has to perform. If it does not, the share value will decrease, and Musk’s trillion will diminish.
As will so many others’ wealth. As will the accumulated wealth in pension funds and other asset banks that the Left considers sacrosanct.
This is what the coveters who would seize Musk’s wealth either ignore or pretend away. They think they can simply take a chunk of that trillion to spend as they wish. They don’t acknowledge the broad economic harm that seizing and liquidating that chunk would cause.
Why?
Because that harm doesn’t matter to them. Results don’t matter. Only power does, and they see their path to power in only one way: stoking envy and hatred of others’ success. They turn it into a pretense of righteousness and claims about fairness, but there’s nothing fair about taking another’s success away.
They claim it’s unjust that Musk grew so wealthy after engaging in cronyism here and there. Would they apply the same argument to anyone who became successful after receiving a government welfare check? Or a government loan that they repaid? Oh wait - I see that line of argument regarding Javier Milei in Argentina all the time.
Don’t fall for it. Taken to its natural conclusion, it is an assertion that the State owns you, that it has endless right to as much of the fruit of your labor as it chooses to take. Remember - their appetite for your money is insatiable. Their rapacity is endless. The pit that is government greed is bottomless. They won’t stop with billionaires or millionaires. Concede their claims to Musk’s wealth and they will get to yours eventually.
While this may sound cold, here’s a reality check. Musk’s wealth isn’t harming you or making you poor.
If you want to point a finger of blame, start with the government that has devalued the dollars you earn and save, that has removed the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, making it harder for those at the bottom to climb up, that has made everything in your life more expensive via overregulation and excessive meddling, and that has burned trillions of your tax dollars with nothing but a staggering mountain of debt and an even more staggering mountain of unfunded liabilities to show for it. The real enemies are the politicians who claim to be your friends and promise to steal from others on your behalf, not the innovators who create the better mousetraps.
Finally, a fourth way, for anyone who offers up the “he got rich off government contracts” canard. If the city you live in hires you to fill some pot holes, does the city get to later claim a share of your life earnings or savings, simply because you did business together?