Paul Graham’s most recent essay (which was actually a speech, given to the Oxford Union) is an argument against this statement from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

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 that

I think there are two arguments here. When she says “You can’t earn a billion dollars,” I read that as “it’s not possible to do anything to deserve a billion dollars”; but when she says “You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth”, she’s saying “you can’t be in possession of a billion dollars without having done something nefarious to get it”.

I’m not saying AOC has ever done this (I don’t know much about her), but this pair of arguments makes a very tempting motte-and-bailey. The left can make the more dramatic argument that “all billionaires are cheaters”. Then if anyone points out that it’s possible to inherit a billion dollars as a baby, before you could possibly have done anything wrong, they can fall back to saying “ah, but clearly the baby didn’t deserve that billion dollars, which is what I was talking about all along”.

Paul Graham saw this fortification, and decided he’d be perfectly happy attacking the bailey (that’s the weak one) while pretending he couldn’t see the motte. His own summary of his talk is:

There are two numbers that determine how big a startup gets, and thus how rich its founders become: the growth rate and how long it continues. You get the first by making something users like so much they tell their friends. You get the second by being in a big market. If you grow exponentially into a big market, your startup will become valuable, and you, as a shareholder, will become rich. You not only don’t have to cheat to make this happen, it will happen automatically if you just keep making customers happy.

The argument that no one has ever reached a net worth above a billion dollars without cheating is an easy target. You just have to find one counterexample. The left’s stronger argument—that no one can have done anything to give them the right to so much wealth (and, by proxy, power) relative to other people—is much harder to disprove, and pg chose not to try.

I think that’s a shame. There are lots of good arguments one can make for why—even though it superficially seems very unfair—setting society up in this way has huge benefits, on net, that we should be terrified of losing. There are lots of counterarguments the left can make about why treating property rights as sacrosanct, even in the most extreme cases, could actually be bad for society. I think these are more interesting arguments, but I also think people like Paul Graham should be more interested in having them, because to a lot of people, arguments that rely on the inherent unfairness of large wealth imbalances are the most persuasive form of argument against billionaires. So if you want to change minds, you should tell us why these arguments are wrong!