Hiltzik: Who will stand up for our beleaguered billionaires?

What’s the most downtrodden and persecuted minority in America?

If you said it’s transgender youths, immigrant workers or women trying to access their reproductive health rights, you’re on the wrong track.

The correct answer, judging from a surge in news reporting over the last couple of weeks, is the American billionaire.

Concern about the welfare of this beleaguered minority (there are about 2,000 billionaires in the U.S.) has been triggered — or re-triggered — by the victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s June 24 Democratic primary.

A self-described “democratic socialist,” Mamdani has had to weather bizarrely focused questions from cable news anchors and others about comments he has made about extreme wealth inequality in the U.S., and specifically in New York.

“I don’t think that we should have billionaires,” he told Kristen Welker of NBC’s “Meet the Press” on June 29.

Welker had asked Mamdani, “Do you think that billionaires have a right to exist?” This was a weirdly tendentious way of putting the question. She made it sound as though he advocated lining billionaires up against a wall and shooting them. In fact, what he has said is that the proliferation of billionaires in America, and the unrelenting growth in their fortunes over the last decades, signified a broken economic system.

Nevertheless, the billionaire class and their advocates in the media and on cable news expressed shock and dismay at the very idea. “It takes people who are wealthy in New York to maintain the museums, maintain the hospitals,” John Catsimatidis, a billionaire real estate and supermarket tycoon, fulminated on Fox News. “Do you know how much money we put up to contribute toward museums and hospitals and everything?”

Catsimatidis may not have realized that he had proved Mamdani’s case: In New York and around the country, a tax structure that indulges the 1% with tax breaks has forced austerity on museums and hospitals and services that should be publicly supported. They’re public goods, and they shouldn’t be dependent on the kindness of random plutocrats.

The sheer scale of billionaire wealth in the U.S. prevents most people from understanding how historically outsized it is. “To own $1 billion is to possess more dollars than you’ll ever count,” observed Timothy Noah of the New Republic in a must-read takedown of the American oligarchy published last month. “It’s to possess more dollars than any human being will ever count. And that’s just one billion. Forbes counts 15 Americans who possess hundreds of billions.”

The most comprehensive defense of billionaires appeared July 1 in the Financial Times. It was written by Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-business think tank that has advocated against increasing the minimum wage (in a article by Strain), against the Dodd-Frank post-Great Recession banking reforms, against environmental legislation and against tobacco regulations, among other bete noires of the right.

“We should want more billionaires, not fewer,” Strain writes. “While amassing their fortunes, billionaires make the rest of us richer, not poorer.”

Exhibit A on Strain’s docket is Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com magnate whose recent wedding in Venice is estimated to have cost as much as $25 million, tasteful and unassuming as we all know it to have been.

Strain cites the common estimate of Bezos’ personal fortune at about $240 billion. He then applies a calculation developed by Nobel economics laureate William D. Nordhaus in 2004, that only 2.2% of the social value of innovations is captured by the original innovators. If Bezos’ $240 billion is 2.2% of the social value of Amazon’s revolution in retailing, then Bezos must have created $11 trillion in wealth for the rest of us.

“Not a bad deal,” Strain writes.

Strain’s interpretation of Nordhaus is hopelessly half-baked. First, Nordhaus was talking about the gains captured by corporations, not individual entrepreneurs. Also, his estimate arose from abstruse economic formulas and lots of magic asterisks.

Nordhaus didn’t present his findings as a defense of any particular economic policies — the 2.2%, he wrote, was excess or “Schumpeterian” profits, those exceeding what would be expected from the normal return from invested capital, which implies that they’re somewhat illegitimate.

Further, it makes no sense to start with an individual entrepreneur’s wealth and extrapolate it to the social value of his or her innovation. It would be more appropriate to try to estimate the social value of the innovation, and then ask whether the innovator’s profits are too much, not enough, or just right.

I asked Strain to justify his treatment, but didn’t hear back.

Another issue with Strain’s advocacy is that he depicted every innovation as the product of a single person’s efforts. Elsewhere in his op-ed, he wrote that Bill Gates and Michael Dell “have made hundreds of millions of workers more productive by creating better software and computers, driving up their wages.”

He also cited Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who “revolutionized email, internet search and mapping technology”; he added that “many of us would eagerly shell out money every month for these services, if they weren’t provided by Google free of charge.”

(Is that so? If Google thought that consumers would eagerly pay for its services, you can be sure the company would find a way to charge for them, instead of making its money from advertising and sponsorship deals.)

This isn’t the first time that billionaires have felt abused by the zeitgeist. Back in 2021, I wrote that America plainly leads the world in its production of whining billionaires. My example then was Leon Cooperman, a former hedge fund operator who appeared on Bloomberg to grouse about proposals for a wealth tax. He called them “all baloney,” though a viewing of the broadcast suggested he was about to use another label beginning with “B” and caught himself just in time.

A few years earlier, in a ghastly letter published in the Wall Street Journal, Silicon Valley venture investor Thomas Perkins compared the suffering he and his colleagues in the plutocracy had experienced due to public criticism to that of Jews facing Nazi pogroms. “I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich,’” Perkins wrote.

The truth, of course, is that while rich entrepreneurs love to pose as one-man bands, every one of them acquired their wealth with the help and labor of thousands of others. Many of the rank-and-file workers without whom Bezos, Dell and their fellow plutocrats could have reached their pinnacles of fortune have struggled in the oligarchic economy, relying on public assistance to make ends meet.

Bill Gates didn’t originally create “better software” — Microsoft’s original product was a computer operating system he sold to IBM, but which was developed by someone else, Gary Kildall. As of last year, Microsoft employed more than 220,000 people. Dell’s original innovation wasn’t a better PC, but a system of selling clones of IBM PCs by mail order.

It’s proper to question whether any of these innovations have been unalloyed social boons. Amazon may have revolutionized retail, but at the cost of driving untold mom-and-pop stores, and even some big chains, out of business, and paying its frontline workers less than they’re worth.

As for its benefits for consumers, in a lawsuit filed in 2022, California accused Amazon of hobbling retail market competition by having “coerced and induced its third-party sellers and wholesale suppliers to enter into anticompetitive agreements on price.”

The state said that “Amazon makes consumers think they are getting the lowest prices possible, when in fact, they cannot get the low prices that would prevail in a freely competitive market.” (Emphasis in the original.)

Amazon says the state’s claims are “entirely false and misguided,” and denies the state’s assertion that its agreements with vendors and suppliers are designed to “prevent competition” or “harm consumers.” The case is scheduled to go to trial in San Francisco state court in October 2026.

That brings us back to Mamdani. In questioning whether billionaires should exist in the U.S., he was implicitly repeating an observation favored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.): “Every billionaire is a policy failure,” a phrase generally attributed to AOC adviser Dan Riffle.

Riffle’s point is that the accumulation of such wealth reflects policies that exacerbate economic inequality such as tax breaks steered toward the richest of the rich, leading to the impoverishment of public services and programs. That trend has been turbocharged by the budget bill President Trump signed on July 4, which slashes government programs to preserve tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy enacted in 2017 by a Republican Congress and signed by Trump.

Mamdani adeptly underscored that point during his appearance on “Meet the Press.” “I don’t think that we should have billionaires,” he told Welker, “because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of so much inequality, and ultimately, what we need more of is equality across our city and across our state and across our country.”

His prescription is to raise the state corporation tax by several percentage points to match that in neighboring New Jersey, and to add a 2-percentage-point city surcharge on incomes over $1 million, and use the revenue to finance free bus service, free child care and other public services.

The focus by cable news and other media organizations on the idea that Mamdani would erode New York’s economic base by driving the ultra-rich out of the city was as dubious as it was sadly predictable. Some of them have been feeding on spoon-fed pap by the rich and powerful for so long that — as A.J. Liebling once put it — they need to relearn how to chew. Then Mamdani would get a fair shake, and so would the rest of us.