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When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars,” she wasn’t wrong to name exploitation. But she was wrong to name every fortune that way. The line lands because populism is simple — and it targets people for hatred. Naming an enemy works. It always has. But if you’re serious about justice, you can’t build it on resentment. Billionaires should exist for one simple reason: in any fair system that includes a healthy dose of luck, they inevitably will.
The Game Is Capitalism
If I play a game, I play to win. I learn the rules, find the META (gamer speak for Most Efficient Tactics Available), and compete to excel. The problem is that too many progressives want to play socialism while the rest of the world is still playing capitalism. They scold the game, refuse to play, and blame others for the loss.
Capitalism is amoral, not immoral. It doesn’t reward goodness or fairness; it rewards ownership of leverage, scale, and speed. That means we can — and must — bend it toward moral ends rather than cede the field to the greedy and rent-seeking. If you leave a game to the worst players, don’t be surprised when they corrupt it.
Where AOC Is Right — and Wrong
She’s right that some billionaires got there through extraction — underpaying labor, gaming laws, hoarding rents. That’s theft by another name. But she’s wrong to pretend that’s the whole story. Some fortunes come from creation: innovation, coordination, risk-taking, with, it must be said, a healthy dose of luck. In any fair system that contains risk and randomness, outliers will emerge. Sometimes spectacularly so.
The trick isn’t to stop them from existing (as if you could) — it’s to police them so they don’t rig the system after the fact. That means taxing fairly so wealth contributes to the society that made it possible, curbing monopolies to keep markets open and innovation alive, and limiting political influence so money can’t purchase democracy. The goal isn’t to eliminate winners. It’s to keep the game honest.[1]
Jay-Z parlayed his monopoly on his enormous talent (and his wife Beyoncé) into a billionaire power couple. What wages did he steal? What worker collective should he establish? Steven Spielberg? Oprah? And so on. Workers are the lynchpin here and that leads me to my next point.
The Moral Obligation of Winners
When capitalism’s winners forget the social fabric that sustains them — schools, roads, courts, labor, consumers — the system curdles into rot. Politics becomes ugly and bad things can happen. They need to remember that social fabric consists of people who have voluntarily made them rich. So show gratitude — and afford them fair taxes in proportion to the public goods they enjoy, living wages so full-time work leads to a full life, honest competition instead of monopoly or captured regulation, and reinvestment in the communities that raised your markets and your workers.
That’s not socialism. That’s stewardship.
The Progressive Error
Progressives often confuse moral critique with moral condemnation. They attack wealth itself instead of the unjust systems that distort it believe they are one and the same. The result is they drive good people out of the arena. If you vacate the field, you don’t purify the world — you forfeit it.
The moral task isn’t to wish capitalism away; it’s to discipline it — to aim its power at human flourishing instead of greed. That’s how you beat the game: not by quitting, but by outplaying the immoral within it.
The World I Want
I want a world where billionaires exist because they earned it justly — through ingenuity, service, and the courage to take real risks. I want a capitalism worthy of human dignity — one that lifts as it climbs and measures success by how many lives rise with yours.
If I play a game, I play to win. The difference is, I know what winning should look like: a world where success uplifts rather than devours.
The Nordics are examples of societies where there are more billionaires per capita than the United States but also have the highest unionization rates in the world. Embarrassing facts for ideologues across all stripes of our political spectrum. ↩︎