Should Billionaires Be Allowed to Exist?

Bernie Sanders' reasoning tells us why the answer is Yes.

I saw an interview in June in which NBC interviewer Kristen Welker asked Zohran Mamdani, fresh off his win in the New York mayoral Democratic primary, a good question: “Should billionaires be allowed to exist?”

With the November election coming, I wrote a piece for Hoover in late October that was published yesterday. The editor titled it “Why Billionaires Should Exist.” Not a bad title but I still prefer mine, which is the title of this Substack.

In thinking it through, I remembered something that Bernie Sanders had said after he became a millionaire. With his one sentence, Bernie gave us a beautiful road map for justifying the existence of billionaires.

Here are the opening two paragraphs of my article “Why Billionaires Should Exist,” Defining Ideas, November 5, 2025:

Two of the most strident critics of billionaires in America are Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, newly elected mayor of New York, and Bernie Sanders, the socialist US senator from Vermont. When asked by NBC interviewer Kristen Welker whether billionaires have a right to exist, Mamdani dodged the question about rights but did say forthrightly that we shouldn’t have billionaires. Now that he has won, Mamdani will likely do his darndest to make sure they don’t exist in New York City. He advocates adding 2 percentage points to New York City’s income tax rate on income over $1 million. That would raise high-income people’s NYC marginal tax rates from 3.876 percent to 5.876 percent, an increase of over 51.5 percent.

But the more fundamental question is whether billionaires should be allowed to exist. My answer is yes. I’m assuming that we’re not talking about whether billionaires should be murdered. Even if Mamdani thinks that billionaires have no right to exist, his policy response, presumably, would be to forcibly take enough of their wealth to drive it below $1 billion. So, my response is both that they should be allowed to live—a view that, hopefully, is not controversial—and that they should be allowed to keep their wealth.

And these are the two paragraphs in which I bring in Mamdani ally Bernie Sanders:

First, consider the argument for respecting billionaires’ rights to their wealth. I could make my argument for rights in a vacuum, but Bernie Sanders has already provided a road map for that argument. After he became a millionaire, Senator Sanders quit attacking millionaires and raised the ante: he shifted to attacking billionaires. Something he said when he became a millionaire is quite relevant here. He had written a book that had sold well and here is how he explained and defended his newfound wealth. He stated, “I wrote a bestselling book. If you write a bestselling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”

Notice something important that is implicit in his statement. Sanders thinks that he has a right to the $1.06 million that, according to this news story, he made on the book. His implicit moral claim is worth a lot. For many decades, Sanders described himself as a socialist. The term “socialist” can be used to mean many things, all the way from wanting an expanded welfare state to having an all-powerful government that claims ownership of everything and takes people’s wealth. Wherever Sanders is on that spectrum, his statement makes clear that he rejects one important tenet of extreme socialism, namely, that productive people should not be able to keep what they earn. So far, Bernie and I are on the same page.

Read the whole thing.