Billie Eilish, the Generation Z pop star famous for her song “bad guy,” has decided there’s a new bad guy in town, and it’s not her; it’s billionaires. “If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?” she asked onstage at a recent event to celebrate innovators. “No hate, but, yeah, give your money away.”
To her credit, the millionaire decided to practice what she preached by having late-night host Stephen Colbert announce that she is donating $11.5 million to issues including “food equity” and “climate justice.” (The latter target suggests that rich people really should just keep their money if they want to do the rest of us any good.)
HOW MUCH WILL MAMDANI’S SOCIALIST EXPERIMENT COST NEW YORK?
Eilish isn’t the only one targeting billionaires, though. They are the on-screen villains in films such as Don’t Look Up and Glass Onion. They are the bogeymen of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and have been the primary target of his ire ever since he became a millionaire himself. A celebrity or politician may safely purchase a Lamborghini, but once we’re in private jet territory, things start to get a little dicey.
Likewise, Zohran Mamdani just became the mayor-elect of New York City by promising to use the government’s knife to slash prices and by complaining about the ultra-wealthy. “I don’t think that we should have billionaires,” he said in an interview, “because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality.”
To celebrities and politicians who benefit from such simplification, the cure for the wealth gap in the United States (as if it were representative of an illness) is for billionaires to give their money away to those less fortunate. They’re unlikely to do so voluntarily, and that’s where the government would step in.
This reasoning falls into what free market economist Milton Friedman called the fixed pie fallacy: “Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.” If there is only so much money to go around, then if we simply redistribute it through taxation and entitlements, all will be well.
But this ignores the fact that billionaires tend to accumulate their wealth by creating value. Think of Elon Musk, who cofounded seven companies, including Tesla and SpaceX. Without Mark Zuckerberg, there would be no Facebook. Without Jeff Bezos, there’d be no Amazon. Even musical artists such as Taylor Swift have brought joy (quantifiable in cash) to their millions of fans.
Not to mention the fact that many billionaires are serious philanthropists (for better or for worse — we’re looking at you, Bill Gates). Zuckerberg, who was witness to Eilish’s speech, has already donated billions to charity and pledged to give away much more.
Sure, billionaires ought to give away much of their wealth (as long as it’s not going to climate justice). But that doesn’t mean their riches are ill-gotten gains or that the government should decide at what point a wealthy person becomes too wealthy. On the contrary, as David R. Henderson writes for the Hoover Institute, “Allowing billionaires to exist makes the rest of us better off.”
During the 2024 election season, Eilish, who endorsed then-Vice President Kamala Harris, posed a question to her fans: “Do you like freedom?” Unfortunately for Eilish, freedom and her socialist leanings are incongruous. As economist Friedrich Hayek wrote in Individualism and Economic Order, “We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with the full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.”
A world without billionaires would be one with less freedom and less innovation. The “bad guys” are the ones who would, in attempting to manufacture equality, strip those things away.
