**How Much Will Mamdani’s Socialist Experiment Cost New York?**
Eilish isn’t the only one targeting billionaires these days. They have become the on-screen villains in films such as *Don’t Look Up* and *Glass Onion*. They are also the bogeymen of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who has made billionaires 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 talking private jets, things start to get a little dicey. Similarly, Zohran Mamdani — the newly elected mayor of New York City — campaigned on promises to use government power to slash prices and repeatedly criticized 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.”
For celebrities and politicians who benefit from such oversimplifications, the remedy for the wealth gap in the United States (as if it were some sort of disease) is for billionaires to simply give their money away to those less fortunate. Since billionaires are unlikely to make such voluntary donations, that’s where government intervention would come in.
This line of 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.” In other words, if there is only so much money to go around, then redistributing it through taxation and entitlements should balance things out.
However, this argument ignores the fact that billionaires often accumulate their wealth by creating real value. Consider Elon Musk, who co-founded seven companies, including Tesla and SpaceX. Without Mark Zuckerberg, there would be no Facebook. Without Jeff Bezos, no Amazon. Even musical artists such as Taylor Swift have brought joy to millions of fans — joy that can be quantified in cash.
Not to mention, many billionaires are serious philanthropists. For better or worse (we’re looking at you, Bill Gates), individuals like Zuckerberg have already donated billions to charity and pledged to give away much more.
Sure, billionaires ought to give away a significant portion of their wealth — just perhaps not exclusively to causes like climate justice. But that doesn’t mean their riches are ill-gotten or that the government should dictate when a wealthy person becomes “too wealthy.”
As economist David R. Henderson writes for the Hoover Institution, “Allowing billionaires to exist makes the rest of us better off.”
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**Walz’s Bad SNAP Math**
During the 2024 election season, Eilish — who endorsed then-Vice President Kamala Harris — asked her fans an important question: “Do you like freedom?” Unfortunately for Eilish, freedom and her socialist leanings are incompatible.
As economist Friedrich Hayek explained 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 not only be one with less freedom but also less innovation. The “bad guys” are those who, in attempting to engineer equality, end up stripping away both.
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In summary, while tackling wealth inequality is a noble goal, dooming billionaires and their contributions overlooks the positive impact they have on the economy, innovation, and society at large. Mamdani’s socialist experiment in New York City raises important questions about the future cost of such policies — both economically and ethically.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3877745/billie-eilish-billionaires-value-wealth-gap/