Sen. Elizabeth Warren needs to learn a basic truth about technology and the economy.
Just about everything starts out as rich people toys. This is the one form of trickle-down economics, which definitively works. Only by grasping this truth will Warren be able to correct her views on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his rocketing into space.
Warren’s general complaint is that spending money on a joyride removes the ability to raise wages or deal with poverty or vaccinate the world. Her contention appears to be that if we simply take the money off those who would waste it, we can then allow our distinguished politicians to spend said money on things that really matter. But this silliness is to ignore how technology advances.
Rich people’s toys.
The cellphone revolution started in my adult lifetime, with those first brick-sized items costing around the price of a decent used car (I’ve definitely spent less than $4,000 on a car in modern money, let alone at 1983 values). Now Burmese farmers can video their revolution, or perhaps oppression, on $20 Androids. Mr. Daimler and Mr. Benz sold an entire 35 of their first car model. It was 30 years before Henry Ford brought the freedom of personal transport to the working man with his Model T. We actually know the day that Queen Elizabeth I gained her first pair of stockings — it’s in her diary. It took the arrival of the Industrial Revolution for every mill girl to have her own.
This is the thing that this strange mixture of capitalism and free markets is observably, empirically excellent at doing: taking those expensive items enjoyed by the rich and making them cheap, cheap, cheap for the mass market.
There does need to be that group doing the experimentation though. We need those who have the resources to fritter away on things that might work, might not. It’s possible to argue, as many do, that government should be doing this cost-benefit analysis. But with the evidence, no government has developed marketplaces of cheap cellphones, mass-market cars, or affordable women’s clothing.
One reason we leave Bezos, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates, etc., with some goodly portion of the money they’ve made is the entirely practical rationale that, by doing so, we encourage the next generation to have its go. It’s not a matter of justice, equality, equity, or even righteousness. It’s just the simple, hard-headed calculation that by leaving the rich to play with their toys, the system will deliver a richer future for our children. It’s been working for 250 years now. Ending the process, as Warren apparently desires, is not something that future generations would thank us for.
