Asked on NBC’s Meet the Press if billionaires have a right to exist, leading NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani answered, “I don’t think that we should have billionaires.”

An economic class should not exist?  Talk about class warfare.  But Mamdani explains: “It is so much money in a moment of such inequality, and ultimately, what we need more of is equality.”

Ah, that’s reassuring.  He’s saying this only because there is presently such inequality.  If there were less inequality, then, apparently, we could have billionaires.

But how much less?  Where does Mamdani draw the line?

Wherever he wants.  Wherever the polls say the voters want.  Contrary to what his words suggest, there is no line.

Mamdani’s words also suggest something else – that whatever we take from billionaires, we will have for ourselves.  Not exactly.

Take, for example, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk.  Musk is currently about $488 billion.

What in the world does he need so much money for?  A single billion dollars, even half that, is plenty for anyone.  So let’s take the rest.

But we find that there is a problem: The money is not held in cash, but invested in businesses — primarily SpaceX and Tesla.  With 79% of the voting shares of the first, and being CEO/largest shareholder of the second, Musk not only owns large portions of these companies, but leads them.  The present valuation is premised at least in part on the expectation of that leadership.  Without that expectation, the valuation of these companies — especially SpaceX — would surely drop, and probably the future profitability of them as well.

To take a different perspective on this, if a “no billionaires” standard had been in force 23 years ago, when Musk, with $100 million in seed money, founded SpaceX, he would have been forced to divest when it reached a billion-dollar valuation — about one half-percent of its current valuation of about $200 billion.  All that additional profit, and the services and products that produced would have been lost.  (Why Socialism Fails 101.)

Take another example: Bill Gates, worth $124 billion, down from $299 billion earlier this year.  He plans to donate 99% of his fortune by 2045.

A large portion of his giving has been to promote measures to combat climate change.  Recently, however, he has conceded that he had overestimated the risk that such change posed.

As a prominent participating multi-billionaire, Gates will be heard.  In Mamdani’s world, there would be no such prominent, independent voices.

Take Warren Buffett — $152 billion after already donating $60 billion, and plans to ultimately leave about 99.5 to philanthropic causes.  But in the meantime, he will (probably) be increasing his estate.

In short, Mamdani assumes that people like him can put the money to better use than those who earned it can.  That’s not the case.

Billionaires are not a different species, indifferent to the needs of others.  If nothing else, they believe in the existence of a God, and that, for their actions and for their inactions, they — Jews (Isaiah 58:7-8), Christians (Matthew 25:35-40), or Muslims (al-Bukhari, 5353) alike — will have to answer...not to Mr. Mamdani, but to their own consciences, to their own God.

Image: Zohran Mamdani.  Credit: Bingjiefu He via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.