Barack Obama’s “you didn’t build that” comment during the 2012 election, part of a larger argument that successful entrepreneurs ultimately derived their wealth from public investments, was widely considered a gaffe at the time.
In retrospect, the former president sounds downright capitalist. A decade and a half of leftward drift in the Democratic Party has given us the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), who argues that not only did you not build that, but if you’re rich enough, you actually stole it.
The New York congresswoman went viral yesterday for comments she made on comedian Ilana Glazer’s podcast describing any billionaire’s wealth as inherently unearned.
“You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that,” said Ocasio-Cortez in the middle of a longer spiel about how capitalism forces people to “internalize” economic hardship as their own fault, and not the result of wider capitalistic forces.
AOC: “There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn… pic.twitter.com/tUi9xTlQ2B
— Marco Foster (@MarcoFoster_) May 7, 2026
The notion that someone has profited off of others’ misery simply by being a billionaire is silly. Philosopher Robert Nozick debunked this idea with his Wilt Chamberlain thought experiment. To summarize, if you redistributed all wealth equally, Chamberlain would quickly end up having way more money than everyone else because a huge number of people would be willing to buy a ticket to see the basketball player live.
Nozick’s point was that even from a starting point of complete economic equality, some people’s superior skills will enable them to make more money than others and that’s fine. The people who voluntarily pay to see Chamberlain are better off for the experience, even if the money they spent on tickets recreates vast wealth inequality.
People have offered the more contemporary example of Taylor Swift as a rebuttal to AOC’s comments, but the point is the same: You can indeed become a billionaire by doing something obviously uncontroversial and non-exploitative like selling concert tickets.
Take the billionaire Taylor swift.
Her recent Era’s tour grossed over $2 billion. The customers are very happy, and most of them would gladly have paid more for their tickets. In the documentary they cover the dancers and some of the crew, who are all shown to be happy with… https://t.co/8r1YV6GlAl
— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) May 8, 2026
Indeed, the source of Swift’s wealth is not so different from AOC’s interlocutor. Glazer is a successful actor and comedian who’s become, even by contemporary American standards, rich and famous by selling performances that people want to see.
The fact that she hasn’t obtained the stratospheric levels of wealth that Swift has doesn’t obviously make one the oppressor and the other the oppressed. It does reek of envy and petty status competition.
There is of course a case that Taylor Swift’s fortune is partially derived from ill-gotten gains. While many consider her to be a talented performer, and she’s certainly a skilled businesswoman, her wealth depends in part on copyright protections of her music that many libertarians would consider a form of unjust, state-granted privilege.
The point is that it’s not the amount of money Swift has earned, but her means of acquiring it that determines whether her fortune is deserved. The primary question to ask is whether one earned their money conducting voluntary exchanges in a free market, or through some state transfer or grant of privilege.
To be sure, in our modern, mixed economy, there’s plenty of state transfers going around. Contra AOC, there are makers and moochers on every rung of the income ladder.
The billionaire who lowers consumer prices by creating an online retail giant and distribution network hasn’t inherently exploited anyone. The middle-income tenant living in a rent-stabilized unit in New York is benefiting from an inherently parasitic relationship created by regulation.
In a follow-up comment on social media, AOC claims that the largest form of theft in the economy is $50 billion in wage theft.
The single largest form of theft in America is wage theft. $50 billion a year are stolen from American workers.
If a billionaire amasses their wealth by underpaying their full-time workers so severely that they must rely on food assistance and government programs to survive,… https://t.co/fH9pBZbpSa
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 7, 2026
Even if that weren’t a nonsense figure that vastly exaggerates the amount of wage theft in the economy, it would still pale in comparison to the $4.5 trillion confiscated from workers’ paychecks each year via federal income and payroll taxes.
In her interview with Glazer, AOC complains of the “myth” we’ve created of the productive billionaire to justify wealth inequality. The far more pervasive myth seems to be the one the congresswoman retails in: that government taxation and state-granted privileges can’t be coercive exploitation because you didn’t earn that money anyway.
Sheldon Richman ends his essay on libertarian class theory with a call to “raise the class-consciousness of all honest, productive people. That is, the industrious must be shown that they are daily victims of the ruling political class.”
AOC wants to obfuscate the fact that she is a member of the ruling class with her own rags-to-Congress story. Don’t buy it. Stand in solidarity with the billionaires she’d like to see the state grind into dust.
