Stop pretending billionaires built the future

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Stop pretending billionaires built the future<br>America was more innovative when we taxed the rich.

Elle Griffin<br>Sep 29, 2025

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Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.This essay is part of my book We Should Own The Economy, which I am writing in public. Readers can still back the project and earn a share of the profits when it sells 👇🏻<br>Learn More

America’s billionaires will call anything “socialism”—so long as it keeps them from paying taxes.<br>They parrot the idea that we need billionaires, because it’s the promise of million-dollar payouts that incentivizes them to build the internet, autonomous vehicles, and rockets.<br>“You want to avoid living in a Soviet hellscape?” Rainmaker CEO Augustus Doricko recently asked founders on X. “Work fucking harder. Stop fucking around with amounts of money for which most Americans would fall on their knees and cry to God with thanks. Proactively ensure everyone in the nation reaps a portion of the reward of your labor, or they’re going to take it from you.”<br>If founders were just more grateful for their money and worked harder for it, he says, rather than flexing their exuberant lifestyles, they wouldn’t attract the ire of the middle class who earn 1000x less, will never afford a house, and are now garnering righteous indignation against their corporate founders and calling to “tax the rich.”<br>Doricko admires the “old capitalists” who worked hard and built public works, instead. If only founders were like them, we wouldn’t be calling for “socialism.”<br>This is, respectfully, ridiculous. The Carnegies and Rockefellers and Morgans earned more than 50,000x the average worker. They may have installed beautiful public libraries and universities, but workers weren’t grateful—they striked and protested. Outrage culminated in the Fair Labor Standards Act: Capitalists were forced to pay employees a minimum wage in 1938, and the top marginal tax rate was increased to 94% by the 1940s.<br>It worked—big time.

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Capitalists were forced to pay workers more, so they necessarily earned less. To avoid paying high income taxes, they invested more money in their companies and workers. Workers earned more, and could afford to buy what those companies produced. From the 1940s to the 1970s, the US was the most economically equal it had ever been. The share of income going to the top 1% fell to historic lows—only 10%—while production skyrocketed to an all time high. Middle-class families could buy homes, send kids to college, and live on a single income.<br>Because of progressive taxation and political capital after World War II, the American government made huge investments in the middle class. It sent 7.8 million WWII veterans to college and helped them buy 4.3 million homes through the GI bill. We built the interstate highway system and New Deal dams, bridges, and power plants. We funded NASA and united around the moon landing. It was one of the most prosperous times in US history—we called it the “Golden Age of Capitalism.”<br>Until the 1980s.<br>Ronald Reagan dropped the top marginal tax rate from 70% down to 28%, and corporate tax rates fell from 50% down to 30%. Executives began to get paid in equity, with investors and founders getting exorbitantly rich from stock options while the average worker’s wages stagnated. The minimum wage peaked in 1968 then ceased to keep up with inflation. We created a new generation of Carnegies and Rockefellers and Morgans, and now they want to build libraries and universities and call it even. They call any form of taxation a “Soviet Hellscape” as a scare tactic, when in fact we can look back at when America was most taxed and call it a “Capitalist Paradise.”<br>The problem now, as in the early 1900s, is not that the rich are being flagrant about their money, but that they are earning so much more than everyone else. The answer is not that the rich should be better about their money and build libraries for us all, but that they should pay their workers more. Our next labor movement should demand, not just a higher minimum wage, but also a minimum salary and a minimum equity share. The highest paid person at every company should earn no more than 20x the lowest paid person—the size of the earnings gap in the 1950s and 1960s—and that should go for equity too.<br>As jobs get automated, we should demand, not just worker ownership of our companies, but collective ownership of the economy. We should tax, not just oil and gas, but all production, so we earn dividends as our companies manufacture cars, spaceships, and even 3D print houses.<br>But how are we going to create collective ownership of the economy if we can’t even tax the production we already have? Or raise the floor of the workers that already exist?...