The nation’s foundation is built upon the bedrock of the right to property and respect for individual labor and its rewards.
This month, Elon Musk became the first trillionaire. Having built the world’s largest satellite internet provider — a company that also pioneered reusable booster-rocket technology and subsequently secured a near-monopoly on achieving escape velocity, all but single-handedly putting America back in the space business after the fallow Obama years — he certainly earned his success.
SpaceX’s debut on the stock market didn’t just contribute to Musk’s wealth. It also created over 4,000 new millionaires overnight, a consequence of the value this firm provides to the public and the nation.
This is the engine of American capitalism at work. Throughout its history, National Review has defended the American social compact and the space it gives enthusiasts, innovators, and entrepreneurs to dare to achieve the unimaginable.
If you, too, aim to keep that engine humming for generations to come, we hope you will join us in our mission by contributing to our “Defending America” webathon. Because the American ideal needs defending, as the attacks on SpaceX have woefully demonstrated.
From the moment that the news of Musk’s deserved prosperity broke, all that Democrats and progressives could think of was how they could get their hands on his money.
Sometimes, they’d tell themselves they need to expropriate his wealth because America’s unsustainable entitlement programs are faltering, as though Democrats hadn’t spent decades demagoguing every meaningful reform to the country’s unfunded liabilities.
Or they’d say that Musk owes his success to government contracts. Therefore, his net worth is fair game — as though federal contracts were a beneficence that Washington can capriciously revoke at will.
In moments of candor, some on the left would argue that it’s simply unethical to allow Musk to enjoy the fruits of his own labor. “Trillionaires shouldn’t exist in a moral society,” argued Representative Jim McGovern.
What’s immoral here is the rapacity to which the Democratic left succumbed. It’s also downright un-American.
As John Locke conceived it, the right to property was as God-granted as the rights to life and liberty. The Lockean ideal is codified in the nation’s founding documents. It is an ideal that protects the individual against being coerced or suborned into sacrificing her talents, efforts, and time to others or the state. As Locke wrote in Two Treatises of Government, “Where there is no property, there is no justice.”
The American foundation is built upon Lockean bedrock, and respect for individual labor and its rewards has contributed in no small measure to America as a force for good in the world. That’s what we at NR believe. If you do, too, we hope that you’ll consider giving to the “Defending America” fundraising drive.
Make no mistake: The attacks on Musk’s wealth are attacks on America.
“The level of wealth that Mr. Musk has reached requires human exploitation, wage theft, wage suppression, anti-competitive markets, monopolistic control, price collusion, inadequate tax systems, and corruption,” Erica Payne, a progressive activist with the outfit Patriotic Millionaires, insisted. In other words, Musk is evidently a symptom of the disease that afflicts America. To get at the root causes of the inequity she describes with an economic illiteracy matched only by her covetousness, America as we know it will have to be deconstructed and reimagined.
We won’t let that happen. We know you won’t either. We hope you will join National Review at the ramparts by contributing whatever you can to the cause.
