Wednesday 30 January 2019

“How a Billionaire Spends His Money Is His Own Business” | WSJ



Something that AOC, Bernie, Pocahontas don't  know, or have forgotten or ignore: wealth creation (capitalism) creates jobs. Socialism destroys them. 
I suspect it's a combination of "don't know" and "ignore". If they have glimmers that maybe socialism might not be the best of all systems, they push them out of their minds because they just want it to work. It's so fair! And equitable!
How Ken Grif­fin and other wealthy peo­ple spend money is their busi­ness. But the left's de­ter­mi­na­tion to con­fiscate more of those dol­lars to redistrib­ute to peo­ple they deem wor­thier con­cerns every­one. In a free-mar­ket sys­tem, so­ciety's most pro­duc­tive mem­bers tend to fa­cil­itate upward mo­bil­ity for all of us, not just for them­selves. And not only through their phil­an­thropy.
Oil re­fin­ing made the Rock­e­fellers rich, but in the process, they made oil prod­ucts much cheaper and thus more widely avail­able to the poor. Prior to Stan­dard Oil, whale oil and candles were a lux­ury that only the wealthy could af­ford. The rest had to go to bed early to save money, explains Burton Fol­som, a pro­fes­sor of his­tory at Hills­dale Col­lege. "By the 1870s, with the drop in the price of kerosene, mid­dle  and work­ing-class peo­ple all over the na­tion could af­ford the one cent an hour that it cost to light their homes at night. Working and read­ing be­came af­ter-dark ac­tiv­i­ties new to most Amer­icans."
Rock­e­feller got rich and Amer­ica got more pro­duc­tive. Henry Ford did some­thing sim­i­lar in auto man­u­fac­tur­ing, as did Sam Wal­ton of Wal­mart fame with re­spect to big-box dis­count stores. Bill Gates has done more for hu­man­ity cre­at­ing his com­puter-soft­ware for­tune than he will ever do giv­ing it away through his foun­da­tion. Wealth cre­ation plays a far big­ger role than phil­an­thropy or gov­ernment trans­fer programs in im­prov­ing our stan­dard of liv­ing, some­thing that those for­ever try­ing to "stick it to the rich" ei­ther don't un­der­stand or choose to ig­nore out of po­lit­i­cal expedience.