(A News and Sentinel Op-Ed - Photo Illustration - MetroCreativeConnection)

MetroNews Talkline cohost T.J. Meadows has been quite up in arms lately about what he refers to as the progressive left or, as in one Facebook post from T.J., “Washington Liberals,” and their criticism of Elon Musk becoming the world’s first official trillionaire. He is just indignant that those on the political left are so critical of his beloved laissez-faire capitalism and its inherent economic inequities.

One of T.J.’s main arguments is that SpaceX’s IPO made many company employees and many investors millionaires, with some even winding up worth hundreds of millions, so it’s not as if only Musk benefited — it’s all just the result of perfectly logical and unbiased free markets assessing and assigning value fairly and high risktakers reaping just rewards. That’s nonsense.

Billionaires and trillionaires do not exist because of some fair and unbiased invisible hand akin to a deity impartially deciding they should be using analytics; they exist because of stolen wages, denied benefits, enormous taxpayer subsidies leaving public coffers for crucial programs chronically underfunded, socialization of the costs of environmental and public health destruction and degradation, union-busting, exploitation of consumers, and investment of profits in buybacks and write-offs, as opposed to workforces or improving and expanding operations.

People like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are dragons lying on mounds of hoarded gold, except that calling them dragons only boosts their egos, so I prefer to think of them as the giant slimy toad gorging itself parasitizing a sacred fig tree in Guillermo Del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth. While their wealth and assets are well-known, people like Bezos and Musk can appear on paper to the IRS to be paupers for the purposes of taxation and that is morally and ethically repugnant.

Gabriel Zucman, professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and founding director of the International Tax Observatory, discussed in a piece for The Guardian recently how extreme wealth is very real, not just virtual or notional, and very problematic. Focusing on Elon Musk, Zucman wrote:

“The first trillionaire himself couldn’t illustrate it better. Tesla, the company Musk founded in 2003, didn’t turn a profit until 2020. This didn’t prevent him from buying Twitter and turning the social network into a platform for a variety of political and ideological causes, including getting Donald Trump re-elected. His fealty earned him a quasi-cabinet position, the direction of the so-called ‘Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE),’ with total freedom to slash government spending not to his liking.

“During his tenure, DOGE shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), leading to the termination of numerous programs tackling malnutrition, HIV and preventable disease around the world. A study published in the Lancet found that these cuts could result in more than 14 million deaths, including 4.5 million in children younger than age five, by 2030. Great wealth is never ‘virtual.'”

Zucman also quotes James Madison, father of the U.S. Constitution and 4th U.S. President, as saying “In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied … The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes.” Madison knew, as did political thinkers and philosophizers for thousands of years before him, that vast wealth is a corrupting force in politics.

Musk grew up the son of a wealthy emerald mine owner in apartheid South Africa, unethically took control of Tesla, coasted by on billions in government subsidies for two decades and is now a trillionaire following the IPO of a company that, at the time of the offering, was operating on $4.2 billion in annual losses. PayPal, Musk’s first big venture, was founded by Max Levchin; Tesla was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning; any success SpaceX has had has been as a result of engineer Tom Mueller and others. Musk is not an inventor, designer or innovator of anything.

I’m a leftist progressive and avowed socialist and have no qualms about it. That said, I don’t hate wealth; I hate the concentration of wealth and what it does to our governments, cultures, economies and societies. The concentration of wealth and democracy are like oil and water. Americans and people the world over deserve more representative democracy built on the foundation of the egalitarian principle of “one person, one vote.” What we’re looking at in the U.S. under the current regime is oligarchic authoritarian fascism.

Maybe Mr. Meadows doesn’t see a problem with the concentration of wealth and its many detrimental effects. Maybe, like many Libertarians I’ve known over the years, he feels confident that true freedom includes the freedom to starve and lack potable water, healthcare, education or anything else that sustains and enriches life. He publicly espouses Christianity, though, and even as an outspoken atheist I can tell you that rushing to the defense of the existence of billionaires and trillionaires doesn’t sit well with teachings of a man who spoke of camels passing through the eyes of needles and the meek inheriting the earth.

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Eric Engle is a resident of Parkersburg.