Good question, right? How do those billionaires acquire all that wealth? Hard work and grit? Personal genius? Got it from their parents? Other explanations?
According to an Opinion column in The New York Times, which ran in mid-December of last year, recent events (including the Jeff Bezos-Lauren Sánchez wedding - see the photo above) appear to have caused people to change their minds about billionaires. Amazingly (to me, anyway), The Times' column reports that just six years ago, a Cato Institute poll showed that 69% of those who responded to a question about this topic thought that the billionires got rich by "creating value for others." A slightly smaller percentage of people thought that "we are all better off when people get rich."
Like I say, those past poll results are rather amazing, at least to me. If questioned about the topic, I never would have given answers like the ones I just reported. However - and I believe our current president, himself a billionaire, has helped change people's perceptions - I am encouraged to find that there are now fewer people who feel "positive" about the billionaires above us (I was going to say "among" us, but realized that using "among" wouldn't really be accurate). The Times column reports that the public at large is increasingly "turned off" to the billionaire class. The apparent greed and self-regard of the billionaires has probably contributed. It does seem that the Bezos-Lauren Sánchez wedding illuminates those traits, and giving full credit where credit is due, "greed and self-regard" does pretty well describe some of the key personal qualities of our current president.
I am willing to go back to the beginning, and to remember that our Declaration of Independence proclaimed that it is "self-evident" that "all [persons] are created equal." The word "equal" in this sentence does not, of course, mean "the same," and there is no doubt that "creating value for others" can be an important reason that a person might acquire a level of personal wealth that outpaces what others have been able to accumulate. In the end though, the way I read The Declaration of Independence, our nation was founded on the idea that we are "all in this together," and that means that we need, collectively, to ensure that what Adam Smith called the "wealth of nations" is wealth mobilized for the common good.
Just think of how different our social, economic, and political situation would be if that principle were currently informing our public policy!
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