A man who catches 1000 fish can feed more people than a man who catches 10. Even if the man who caught 1000 fish exerted less effort, he has produced more value, helped more people, and thus was paid more. The 1000 fish man has created prosperity for him self, and the hundreds of his customers who were able to buy fish from him on a voluntary basis. A system that supports such voluntary transactions by protecting the seller’s and the buyer’s rights to make voluntary decisions based on their own judgement is ultimately the only moral system there is. This is what is traditionally called free market capitalism, and it is how Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have been able to generate large sums of wealth. They created a product, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft that enriches our lives, which is why we are willing to voluntarily hand over hundreds of dollars to them. This is what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez finds immoral?
Take another example like JK Rowling, “who became a billionaire from her wildly popular Harry Potter series. Rowling certainly worked hard – but so do thousands of other authors who struggle to find an audience. The difference is that millions of people value Rowling’s work. They were willing to turn over £10 or £15 for each Harry Potter novel, because the pleasure they got from those books exceeded the price tag. It was irrelevant to them whether Rowling suffered writer’s block and spent sleepless nights agonising at her desk, or whether she effortlessly poured out a hundred pages a day of perfect prose. It was the value that mattered.” Don Watkins.
The idea that the left pushes forward that billionaires are somehow hoarding wealth is nonsense. Billionaires do not hold their money under the mattress, majority of it is invested back into the economy. Even if a billionaire does the most simplest thing by depositing the money into a bank account, that bank will ultimately reinvest that money into housing or into business loans. It is also moral for the person who created the wealth to be the one who decides how it is used or disposed off. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not proposing anything new, she simply believes that congress should decide how the money is invested. Simple math tells me that if the United States budget is 4 trillion dollars, and there are 435 house representatives, then it is nearly 10 billions dollars per representative. If people in the private sector shouldn’t be in control of billions of dollars, people in government shouldn’t be either.
