When Rex Nutting says so, apparently.
“My own view is that most billionaires do create some value, but they generally take more than their share of money and power. Their wealth far exceeds their economic contributions.”
He insists that cronyism alone is the reason billionaires don’t deserve their wealth, but then fails to identify government as the root cause of it.
To be fair, he has at least correctly diagnosed the disease we suffer in the West (which is beyond most lawmakers) but then he goes on to misidentify the major culprits, gives some examples of their behaviour without any reference to the key factors, and finally finishes with a gruesome flourish like a weightlifter suffering a rectal prolapse.
And here’s why.
Although we might all agree that cronyism is a license to print money, a more orthodox place to lay the blame would not be with those who run the press, but those who issued the licence.
Namely, government.
The comprehensive system of grift and graft with which politicians use to feather their nests via things like the Clinton Foundation are legion. Strangely, they always seem to get a pass and the businessmen who latch onto them as a way of getting ahead are the ones taken to task by “useful idiots” like Nutting and used as sticks to beat free market capitalism with.
Yet in Nutting”s world, the remaining 97% of value is less than this.
Nutting remains completely ignorant of consumer surplus of course – the idea that I am willing to pay £1 for a widget due to valuing it more highly than that is a complete mystery to him.
And finally having fingered the wrong culprits he looks to empower further the real ones – this is the usual insanity of the Left. Unable to see the government as anything but a benign force, they blame all its malignancies on those desperately trying to escape its clutches, and then demand greater powers for it lest any ever escape again.
Nutting correctly claims monopoly is the problem, and then suggests we enlarge the largest monopoly of all to solve these problems.
“Some billionaires are crony capitalists! Let’s empower government further so they ALL are!”
As a misdiagnosis of the problem ailing our societies it takes some beating, and worse it prevents the real cure (free market capitalism) from ever being embraced, by demonising it as the cause.
Government and their stooges – the problems we face today were born of the solutions they inflicted on us yesterday.
