What Makes a Billionaire Bad? Just Add Government.
21st August 2015
“Income inequality” is one of the populist issues du jour, even if there is a certain logical incoherence in believing that the growing income of rich people is somehow necessarily bad for poor people.
A new economic study suggests that, actually, we can calculate when a billionaire’s riches harm the poor and when they’re helpful. The “bad” billionaires aren’t the ones who flood the marketplace with cheap goods and jobs that some folks want to blame for all our ills. Those billionaires help the poor (by providing cheap goods and jobs, obviously). It’s the billionaires who get and keep their riches because of their connections to the government and through crony capitalism who create the most harmful consequences of income inequality.