"BUZZ" of the membership

In our capitalist free market society, excellence is often rewarded with wealth. LeBron James became the first active NBA player in history to reach billionaire status, first crossing the $1 billion mark in 2022; Forbes now puts his net worth at roughly $1.4 billion. That looks like a quintessential American success story. Yet, according to the current political babble from the extreme Left, and one might conclude that LeBron's bank account is a felony crime scene.

This gets at a major divide in our country: is it OK for someone to be a billionaire?

Most conservative Republicans answer "yes", because they are committed to free enterprise and individual rights. LeBron didn't rob a billion dollars from anyone - he earned it through millions of voluntary transactions in a free market. 

But the extreme Left narrative is different. Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders has said billionaires shouldn't exist, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called every billionaire a policy failure.

Those comments are economically illiterate, and disregard the basic individual freedoms granted under our Constitution. Statements by Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez conveniently ignore the millions of high-paying jobs billionaires' businesses create, and rest on an incorrect "fixed pie" assumption, i.e. if LeBron has a billion dollars, he must have stolen it from somebody else. In the growing United States economy most wealth isn't stolen, it is created.

Consider the facts. Fans voluntarily pay hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars for a single ticket to watch LeBron play. They buy his jerseys, his shoes, and the products he endorses. And it isn't just fans buying tickets - media networks are paying a fortune for the right to broadcast the basketball product he is a part of. In 2024, the NBA signed an 11-year media rights deal with Disney, NBC, and Amazon worth a reported $76 billion. Media companies don't commit that kind of money unless they are highly confident tens of millions of people want to watch.

That's fairness in its purest form: building something so valuable that the world pays a premium for it, of its own free will.

Today's redistributionist (some say Communist) Left wants to tax high earners more heavily to fund government programs, treating a fortune like LeBron's as a pool of money the government has a right to seize. That view ignores a basic incentive problem: when you tax success more, you get less of it. It dulls the drive that produces the next LeBron James, or the next entrepreneur willing to push boundaries and create jobs.

Government discourages certain behaviors through fines (a form of taxation) for speeding, illegal parking, noise violations, etc. Taxes work the same way on hard work and investment: the more something is taxed, the less of it you get.

Thomas Sowell, the black economist born in Gastonia, North Carolina in 1930, rose from poverty to become one of the most influential scholars in America. He has long framed the redistribution debate with a simple question: "how much of my money are other people entitled to?". His answer is that individuals, not the government, hold the primary claim on what they earn.

Conservatives want billionaires to reinvest their capital into the private sector, where it does the most good. When someone like LeBron backs a new business, funds a real estate project, or donates to a school, he's creating good jobs and building "local growth" in the communities where he invests. And, history shows, invests more effectively than any government program could - and without massive fraud.

The push to tax the rich more heavily gets dressed up as "fairness." But what's fair about telling a someone like LeBron who came from nothing, worked relentlessly hard and built a global entertainment brand, that he has too much? That contradicts the foundation of a free society.

Messages conveyed through reasoned political debate are clearly superior to the irrational, emotional outbursts of radicals like Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. This matters especially for younger voters: capitalism remains the most powerful engine for human prosperity yet devised. It's the same system that enabled LeBron James from Akron, Ohio, born in poverty to a 16-year-old single mother, become a global icon and a billionaire.

Conservatives want more job-creating billionaires, not fewer. We want anyone with talent, strong work ethic, and a dream can rise to the top without the government reaching into their pocket to abscond with an outsized share of what they rightfully earned. Or, perhaps even worse, government obtaining huge sums of cash and allocating it not based on merit, but rather on political patronage, bribery, and corruption.

In defending the rights of our most financially successful citizens, we defend the freedom of every citizen to pursue their own version of the American Dream.
 

So is it OK for LeBron to be a billionaire? Absolutely yes!