World's first trillionaire!

 

Congress woman Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez, AOC, recently asserted that no one could earn a billion dollars. She needs to update her claim now that Elon Musk has become history's first trillionaire. 

AOC wasn't making a factual statement. She was regurgitating old Marxist nonsense that profits are theft from the workers: business owners shouldn't make profits; all income above the cost of materials belongs to the workers.  AOC made that clear by adding that businessmen can under pay workers, but they haven't earned their profits. They have stolen them from workers. 

I agree with socialists that billionaires and trillionaires shouldn't exist, but for different reasons. They exist today because the Fed has destroyed the purchasing power of the dollar by counterfeiting tsunamis of them over the past century. If the dollar still had the purchasing power it had before the Fed, a trillion in today's dollars would be worth just $29 billion in 1912.  Elon Musk might still be a billionaire, but far from a trillionaire. 

But was Marx right that profits are theft from workers? Of course not. Marx has been proven wrong about everything by the science of economics and history.  Profits are the compensation to business investors for the use of their money to finance the purchases of land, buildings and tools the workers use as well as the raw materials workers transform into useful products for sale. And the owners advance workers their wages long before any products are sold. 

Workers need wealthy businessmen to invest in those things years before any items are sold. Investors deserve compensation for the use of their money by workers. Profits are merely returns on that investment.  Preventing investors from compensation for the use of their funds as socialists like AOC demand is the real theft.

BTW, Musk doesn't have $1 trillion in cash sitting in a bank. That number comes from multiplying the market price of the stock he owns by the number of shares he owns. Almost all of his wealth is tied up in businesses that provide good paying jobs to thousands of workers. In fact, the IPO of SpaceX made 4,000 of those workers millionaires who own stock on the company.