In 2019, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made headlines at the MLK Now conference. When Ta-Nehisi Coates asked whether the world is moral when it allows billionaires to exist, she answered, “No. It’s not.”
Ocasio-Cortez explained that, while she doesn’t necessarily think individual billionaires are immoral, “I think it’s wrong that a vast majority of the country does not make a living wage; I think it’s wrong that you can work 100 hours and not feed your kids; I think it’s wrong that corporations like Walmart and Amazon can get paid—they can get paid by the government essentially, experience a wealth transfer from the public—for paying people less than a minimum wage. It not only doesn’t make economic sense, it doesn’t make moral sense, and it doesn’t make societal sense.”
Many politicians, activists, and commentators have voiced similar sentiments: No one should have a billion dollars. Yet there are now nearly 1,000 billionaires in the United States alone, according to Visual Capitalist, with a combined net worth of more than $4 trillion. When the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a global recession, the richest Americans saw their wealth increase by 40%. At the same time, as Ocasio-Cortez and others have pointed out, 37.9 million people in the U.S. live below the poverty line. Some researchers estimate that at least 27 million people earn less than $30,000 a year, or about $14.42 per hour for full-time work, the mean minimum amount a single adult with no dependents needs to...
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