Lefties are always a victim... lol...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/07/16/socialists-think-billionaires-steal-wealth/
America’s socialists don’t like billionaires. This week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) posted online, “Billionaires get richer while working families struggle.” New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) campaigned last year on getting rid of them: “I don’t think we should have billionaires.” This spring, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) told a podcaster, “You can’t earn a billion dollars.”
AOC made the socialist stance clear in 2020, a year after joining Congress. “No one ever makes a billion dollars,” she said. “You take a billion dollars.”
But the idea that wealth is taken from others rather than created is an idea economists rebutted 155 years ago.
Early economists, such as James Mill and David Ricardo, theorized that the physical labor exerted to create a good is the real measure of its value. Karl Marx took the concept to its extreme: If labor creates all value, then profit must require unpaid labor, making every employer an expropriator and every fortune a crime.
Then, beginning in 1871, economists countered the labor theory of value. Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons and Léon Walras demonstrated independently that value resides not in hours of toil but in the judgments of consumers. Writing a 500-page novel takes the same amount of physical labor as typing out 500 pages of the word “banana” repeatedly. Only the novel commands a price. Value is created whenever someone rearranges the world into a shape that others want. It is measured by the buyer, not the worker.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/07/16/socialists-think-billionaires-steal-wealth/
America’s socialists don’t like billionaires. This week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) posted online, “Billionaires get richer while working families struggle.” New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) campaigned last year on getting rid of them: “I don’t think we should have billionaires.” This spring, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) told a podcaster, “You can’t earn a billion dollars.”
AOC made the socialist stance clear in 2020, a year after joining Congress. “No one ever makes a billion dollars,” she said. “You take a billion dollars.”
But the idea that wealth is taken from others rather than created is an idea economists rebutted 155 years ago.
Early economists, such as James Mill and David Ricardo, theorized that the physical labor exerted to create a good is the real measure of its value. Karl Marx took the concept to its extreme: If labor creates all value, then profit must require unpaid labor, making every employer an expropriator and every fortune a crime.
Then, beginning in 1871, economists countered the labor theory of value. Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons and Léon Walras demonstrated independently that value resides not in hours of toil but in the judgments of consumers. Writing a 500-page novel takes the same amount of physical labor as typing out 500 pages of the word “banana” repeatedly. Only the novel commands a price. Value is created whenever someone rearranges the world into a shape that others want. It is measured by the buyer, not the worker.
