Unlike any other form of employment, entrepreneurship has no minimum wage. It pays no overtime, offers no job security, and often requires 80-hour weeks. The losses and pain risked by entrepreneurship have no floor. The potential for wealth creation, personal and national alike, have no ceiling.
The relative rarity of successful entrepreneurship creates jobs and economic growth, making it a labor form often even more valuable than professional-caliber athleticism or award-winning artistry. But the economy doesn’t just reward the jobs, innovation, and economic growth created by successful entrepreneurs. It also refunds the risks of wasted time, commercial failure, and even millions of dollars of debt and bankruptcy. When the market rewards Jeff Bezos with hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s rewarding his success as much as his courage in creating a company that makes our lives easier and less expensive.
In their pursuit to reelect President Trump, the Left has forgotten why billionaires become billionaires, calling not just for increased taxation as a necessity to fund their growing Christmas list of federal spending, but as a purely punitive measure.
As the great Margaret Thatcher posited decades ago, “So long as the gap is smaller, they would rather have the poor poorer. You do not create wealth and opportunity that way. You do not create a property-owning democracy that way.”
For a more pedestrian iteration of this reality, here’s Lauren Duca:
According to the NYT, if Warren’s wealth tax had been in effect since 1982, Jeff Bezos would have $46.8 billion instead of $160 B last year.
Instead of $97 B, Bill Gates would have $13.9.
That’s hugely significant, and still way more than anyone “deserves.”
Tax the fuckers.
— Lauren Duca (@laurenduca) November 11, 2019
Bezos was born to a teen mom and a deadbeat dad who eventually ditched the family. He worked as a fry cook at McDonald’s during high school to make his way to Princeton University, from where he graduated summa cum laude to join the financial elite.
But Bezos didn’t stay in the security of cushy white-collar hedge funds. Instead, he retired to his garage to create an online bookstore with a single loan from his mother and adoptive father. Today Amazon employs 647,500 people with nearly a trillion-dollar market cap.
Bill Gates came from a more privileged background, with a lawyer father and banker mother. Rather than follow the family footsteps of white-collar job security, Gates spent his entire childhood studying and creating software. He dropped out of Harvard College after two years to work on a computer program. Today, Microsoft employs 144,106 people and provides the majority of operating systems on the market.
A liberal would argue that Bezos and Gates, both of whom donate ample amounts of their wealth to charity, ought to have not only their income taxed but also the wealth they’ve already earned. And the point of this tax for many is not financing government but simply to make Bezos and Gates less wealthy.
And, of course, all of this ignores the reality that the rich are already paying their fair share. The top quarter of earners pay 86% of all federal income taxes, and the top 1% pay more than one-third. If you want to make the case that we ought to punish job creators even more, the case should include the return on their investment to whatever program you’re advocating. Simply claiming people don’t deserve the fruits of their success won’t fly.
