What Good Are Billionaires Anyway?

A couple of years ago there was a story of a woman from Texas had a $60 million wedding in Paris.  She flew in her guests, everyone stayed in the best hotels and had the finest food France had to offer while everyone left with spectacular gifts.

Likewise another money-to-burn story was about Jeff Bezos spending half a billion on a yacht.  It was so big required another boat for support and had its own helicopter and landing pad! Needless to say, that boat is slightly larger than the barrel boat we used to fish off of when I was a kid.

Then there’s the story from a few years ago where some genius with more money than brains paid $6.2 million for a banana held onto the wall with a piece of duct tape.  As an artist I’d have taped a watermelon to the wall for half that!

Of course one doesn’t need to be embarrassingly rich in order to go overboard.  I saw an Instagram post recently of a woman planning a birthday party for a one-year-old. It was insane. There were all kinds of happy birthday signs, balloons, cakes (yes, plural) and a stack of presents halfway to the ceiling.  I was thinking to myself, this is insane. The baby’s one year old! He’s never going to remember!

There are countless other things like this that never make the news or someone’s Instagram feed.  The reality is, the amount of money these people spend on things like this is simply insane, by almost any measure. Some people would even say it’s obscene, and maybe it is. But the truth is, it’s their money.  If they wanted to set it on fire, it’s theirs to do what they wish. But most don’t do that… Although maybe they should, given that a record number of Americans support Socialism and the Communists in Democrat and DSA clothing think there should be no billionaires! Of course taxing them out of existence does sound kinda appealing when we see so many of them or their progeny donate fortunes to leftist causes that hinder others from finding the same success… but I digress. 

How many times have you heard some leftist say “Do you know how much poverty could be relieved for the amount he spent on XXX?” or “How many poor children could be fed for what she spent on XXX?” Blah, blah, blah… They are, by and large, broken records.

But could the money that these billionaires waste really solve world poverty? 

No. 

NGOs spend billions annually “fighting” poverty and the government has spent more than $50 trillion over the last half century, and the results are less than spectacular. But on the upside, we did get a giant, permanent poverty bureaucracy and massive amounts of fraud enriching grifters from sea to shining sea.  If spending billions or trillions cured poverty, it would have been accomplished decades ago.

Nonetheless, aren’t we getting to a point where the rich simply have too much and the poor don’t have enough? Shouldn’t they be forced to share?  As a guy whose bank account is more often red than green, and as much as I could use the infusion of cash, the answer is no. 

The hard truth is, we’re far better off with a bunch of obscenely rich Americans living among us. Why?  Because, unlike command economies, in America most people who get rich did so by providing goods and services that other people value enough to exchange their hard-earned money for.

What’s more, rich people’s money works for everyone else. Unlike Scrooge McDuck, most rich people don’t keep their money in a vault and go in and swim around in it. They usually buy stocks, buy companies, invest in startups, make donations, and probably keep some in banks. Whatever they choose to do with their money, it usually makes its way back into the economy by helping firms hire staff or buy inventory or invest in machinery.  It helps get startups off the ground, funds lending by banks and pays the salaries of NGOs – and sometimes accidentally does some good in the process. 

Take Jeff Bezos’ 417-foot yacht. The Koru, which costs over $25 million a year to operate, cost $500 million to build and has a $75 million boat that follows it to carry all the stuff it can’t hold! 

But that half billion dollars didn’t magically make that boat appear.  It went to pay thousands of dockworkers, steel makers, artisans, woodworkers, not to mention lumberjacks, oil riggers and designers and the restaurants those people ate and the stations where they filled up their gas tanks.   Now, in this case most of those people were in the Netherlands because the US doesn’t build those kinds of ships, but you get the idea.

When it comes to private jets, however, the US rules, and many of the buyers are rich people from around the world. Gulfstream, which manufactures top-of-the-line private jets that sell for between $65 and $80 million, has sold planes to not only Bezos, Musk and Gates, but to many non-Americans like Jack Ma, Cristiano Ronaldo and James Dyson. And just like the giant yachts, when some billionaire buys one of those jets, they’re providing an income not only to the people working at Gulfstream, to their suppliers and subcontractors as well, but in the process they’re supporting those people’s families too.

The same holds true for lavish weddings or the over-the-top birthday parties or private golf outings.  All that spending that seems so obscene is in reality anything but in the big picture.  Sure, it may be ostentatious, but so what?  Every dollar spent provides incomes for countless people down the line that never make the coverage.

There’s inequity in every country and in every civilization.  The only thing that differs is how it comes about and who benefits. In Soviet Russia, in Cuba, in Venezuela, Nigeria and countless other nations where the government basically chooses the winners and losers, what you end up with is a few ultra wealthy people ruling over the impoverished masses. 

American inequality today might be greater than in the past, but the difference between now and when the Robber Barons reigned is that today not only do we have a thriving middle class, but even America’s poor live better than most people around the world. 

America has almost 30% of the world’s billionaires.  That’s a pretty good number for a country that represents 4% of the world’s population.  The thing the left doesn’t get is that that number isn’t a sign of coercion or theft or corruption, but rather it reflects the fact that there’s no place like America for someone to start a company that meets the needs of willing buyers. Does it matter to me that that leftist weasel Bill Gates is a gazillionaire?  No, it doesn’t change my life one iota. But you know what does, the PC I’m typing on that’s running on Windows software. I spend hours behind it every single day, and my life is far better because of that weasel.

That’s the point.  Americans don’t need to like billionaires.  They can even hate them.  But the reality is, Americans thrive because of them.  Most of the billionaires and even millionaires in America got that way because they did something to make other’s lives better. America is a place where people can become obscenely rich by creating goods and services that others are willing to exchange their hard earned money for. It’s not perfect, and things sometimes go wrong, but the freedom, opportunity and choice combine to make the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans far better.  The fact that a few become billionaires along the way is easily a tradeoff worth making.