This post may contain affiliate links. Please read our disclosure for more information.
Senator Warren definitely has a bee in her bonnet when it comes to billionaires, especially Elon Musk. It galls her that most billionaire wealth is in the form of unrealized capital gains and can’t be taxed under the current tax code.
So Senator Warren wants to change that, and her effort to sway public opinion in favor of a wealth tax is often punctuated by her confronting billionaires and tersely saying: “You didn’t earn that!”
To be fair, Senator Warren is absolutely right. No one becomes a billionaire by oneself alone. Elon, for instance, wouldn’t be the world’s richest person if the federal and state governments hadn’t spent billions of dollars constructing millions of lane-miles of roads.
And, yet, while no man is an island, and no one ascends the heights of any field or occupation without a great deal of help, the objectively true indictment “you didn’t earn that” has always irked me. Just why it irked me I couldn’t say. My only recourse, then, was to focus my high-powered brain on that ghastly irritant and get some answers. Here’s what I found:
1. You Didn’t Earn That Either!
Senator Warren didn’t earn the fortune that Elon didn’t earn either. Why should she and her legislative buddies have greater stewardship over that fortune than they do now? Why does she presume that she and her legislative buddies will do more good with more of Elon’s fortune than Elon? Elon has a proven track record of starting innovative companies and employing tens of thousands of people. Odds are that Elon will continue to be an exemplary steward of the money he has won fair and square. What will Congress do with any extra money it extracts from Elon? Enlarge the welfare state and create more dependency? Give more Americans the means—and the license—to sit on their asses and complain about “the rigged system?”
And here’s another thing that Senator Warren didn’t earn. She didn’t earn the power she wields. She didn’t write the constitution that created the national legislature. She didn’t build the Capitol Building. She didn’t build the planes, limos, cameras, phones, mics, screens, websites, and social media platforms that are indispensable to running for national office. Nor did she manage the campaigns and write the speeches that propelled her to one victory after another. Why, then, should she retain all the rights and privileges of a senator? Shouldn’t some of her voting powers be given to others? Perhaps Elon can cast some of her votes?
2. Doing Things to Help People Thrive or Doing Things to Hold Over Peoples’ Heads
My parents did a lot for me. They fed, clothed, housed, doctored, schooled, entertained, banked, shuttled, and sagely counseled me from birth to college. And their devotion to my well-being didn’t stop when I achieved full-blown adulthood and left the nest. Whenever I asked for help, they provided it. Just three years ago, for instance, they let Mrs. Groovy and me live in their home rent-free for six months while Groovy Ranch was being built.
Their devotion to me and my siblings has been nothing short of remarkable. Even more remarkable is this: Not once in my adult life have they ever tried to weaponize their extensive history of devotion toward me and guilt me into doing their bidding. Nor have they attempted to use their extensive history of devotion toward me to create a wedge between me and my siblings. In other words, my parents sacrificed for me and my siblings because they wanted all of us to thrive, to become competent, caring adults. They didn’t sacrifice for us because they wanted something to hold over our heads or create palace intrigue.
Are Senator Warren and her legislative buddies as selfless as my parents? Are they crafting legislation to help all Americans thrive? Or are they crafting legislation to garner some twisted Machiavellian advantage—to gain votes, to extort obedience, or to turn one group of Americans against another group of Americans? I’d like to think it’s the former, but by the way the indictment “you didn’t earn that” leaps so deliciously off Senator Warren’s tongue, I’m afraid it’s the latter.
3. Government Is a Poor Steward of Tax Dollars
There’s a reason why Elon is the richest person in the world. He’s a great steward of resources. Here are just some of the amazing things his companies are doing to advance man’s knowledge and mastery over the physical world:
Now let’s look at what Senator Warren and her legislative buddies have wrought with all the power and resources they have been blessed with:
Senator Warren and her legislative buddies inherited an industrial and technological colossus. During WWII, in just under four years, we built a staggering amount of military hardware—including two nuclear bombs, 10 battleships, 29 aircraft carriers, 234 submarines, 97,000 bombers, 108,000 tanks, and 2.68 million machine guns. Nearly every major advancement in the 20th century was pioneered and mainstreamed in America (i.e., electricity, airplanes, automobiles, skyscrapers, movies, radio, television, refrigeration, airconditioning, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, microwave ovens, pesticides, vaccines, antibiotics, organ transplants, space travel, satellites, lasers, transistors, semiconductors, computers, cell phones, GPS, the internet, etc., etc.). And what did Senator Warren and her legislative buddies do with this unfathomably rich legacy? Did they do what was necessary to keep it going, to propel it to new heights? Haha. Don’t make me laugh. As the above videos so painfully make clear, they let it go to shit. A nation that essentially made the modern world couldn’t even make the paper masks needed to protect its citizens from a worldwide pandemic. We had to make a frantic call to China and pray the mask “supply chain” didn’t falter.
We were once a nation of tinkerers. Now we’re a nation of Tik-Tokers. Pathetic.
Frankly, I don’t care that Elon “didn’t earn” his fortune. I’d rather have that fortune firmly in his hands than in the hands of Senator Warren and her legislative buddies. The chance that he’ll do far more good with it is one of the surest bets I can think of.
Final Thoughts
Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. What say you? Do I have valid reasons for being irked by Senator Warren and her “you didn’t earn that” indictment? Or are my reasons utter flapdoodle? Let me know what you think when you get a chance. Peace.
Did Pocahontas earn her Texas Bar registration, or her being named Harvard’s first woman of color by the Fordham Law Review? She’s got as much Cherokee heritage as Queen Elizabeth.
Come now, masks could never have been produced in the USA. We weren’t in as good a position yet to line Mr Science’s pockets as the Chinese were.
Mrs Groovy recently posted…“You Didn’t Earn That!”
You’re such a cynic, Mrs. G. Perhaps that’s why I love you so much.
My problem with going after unrealized gains is, do they get a refund on unrealized losses? Or how should he be taxed on the sale of his ~$10B in shares that he most recently donated? Or does Elon have the biggest DAF out there. I also think it’s funny that Warrens partner in crime, Sanders, uses the word millionaire a whole lot less now that he’s one now himself.
Haha! I forgot about Sanders’s rhetoric against millionaires. There’s also a YouTuber from Vermont called Styxhexenhammer666 who is wont to call out Bernie’s hypocrisy. We got an awesome political class, on both sides of the aisle. Thanks for stopping by, my friend. Cheers.
Insightful argument. Thank you.
Thank you, Sarah.