There was a moment during a television interview this week that took me right back to my years working with Rush Limbaugh.
Brian Kilmeade was interviewing Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna about the unrest in France, economic inequality, and the growing resentment toward wealthy people.
Khanna was talking about billionaires. How much wealth they control. How difficult life has become for young people who can’t afford homes, struggle to find jobs, and wonder whether the American dream is still available to them.
And Kilmeade pushed back.
He pointed out that some of those very billionaires have created enormous numbers of jobs, generated wealth for other Americans, and built companies that have transformed entire industries.
Then he said something that stopped me.
“A lot of people come to this country to have success. And you and others are condemning that success.”
I got chills.
Not because Brian had uncovered some previously unknown economic theory.
Because I could almost hear Rush.
For years, Rush Limbaugh talked about the political impulse to punish achievement. He understood that there was something deeply wrong with treating success as though it were evidence of wrongdoing.
And here we are, all these years later, having essentially the same argument.
Only now the numbers have gotten bigger, the politicians have gotten louder, and apparently the billionaires are supposed to apologize for being billionaires.
Let me ask you something.
When did making money become a character defect?
I don’t mean stealing money. I don’t mean cheating people, abusing workers, breaking laws, or using political connections to obtain special favors.
I’m talking about building something people want, hiring people to help produce it, taking enormous risks, and succeeding.
When did that become something Americans were supposed to resent?
We used to admire people who started with an idea and turned it into something extraordinary.
We understood that somebody who built a successful business didn’t necessarily take success away from everybody else. Quite often, that person created opportunities that hadn’t existed before.
Jobs. Careers. Investments. New products. Entire industries.
And sometimes, yes, an absolutely enormous fortune.
Now listen to the political conversation.
We hear about how much wealth billionaires possess. How many billionaires live in a particular congressional district. How much of the economy they supposedly control.
And then comes the familiar demand that somebody needs to do something about all that success.
Usually somebody in Washington.
Which, considering Washington’s record of managing money, is a rather interesting choice.
These are people who can spend trillions of dollars, run enormous deficits, and still lecture a businessman about financial responsibility.
Imagine running your household that way.
You spend more than you earn, borrow the difference, announce that you’re broke, and then summon your neighbor to explain why his new swimming pool is unfair to you.
That’s not an economic program. That’s a neighborhood association meeting gone horribly wrong.
Now, I want to be fair to Congressman Khanna on one point.
He’s right that many young Americans are frustrated.
Housing costs are crushing. Student debt can be overwhelming. Starting a family or buying a first home can seem impossibly difficult.
These are real problems, and politicians ought to take them seriously.
But the existence of those problems doesn’t automatically mean that somebody else’s wealth caused them.
And it certainly doesn’t mean that the solution is to make successful people less successful.
That is where the argument starts going sideways.
If a young person can’t afford a house, I want to know what we can do to make housing more affordable.
If someone can’t find a decent job, I want to know how we create more opportunities.
If regulations, taxes, energy costs, and government policies are making life unnecessarily expensive, let’s talk about those policies.
But what does any of that have to do with resenting the person who invented something valuable and made a fortune doing it?
Rush understood the danger of that kind of thinking.
He talked about the way political rhetoric can turn achievement into something suspicious, as though the mere fact that one person has more means that another person has been cheated.
And that is a poisonous idea in a country built on opportunity.
Because once you start telling people that success itself is the problem, you begin changing the way they think about their own futures.
Instead of asking, “How can I accomplish something extraordinary?” people begin asking, “Why does that person have more than I do?”
Those are very different questions.
One looks forward.
The other looks across the street.
And if you’re not careful, the second question becomes a full-time occupation.
There will always be somebody with a bigger house, a nicer car, a better investment portfolio, or a private jet.
I have news for you. There are people with more money than I will ever see in my lifetime.
Some of them probably spend more maintaining their swimming pools than I spend on things I actually need.
But I don’t wake up in the morning furious that somebody else has a bigger swimming pool.
I wake up thinking about my own life, my own work, and what I want to accomplish.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t debate tax policy. Of course we should.
It doesn’t mean every billionaire is a saint. Good heavens, some of them are spectacularly irritating.
And it doesn’t mean wealthy people should be exempt from paying taxes or following the law.
It means we ought to remember the difference between demanding fair treatment and demanding that successful people be punished for succeeding.
Consider the contradiction.
Politicians celebrate new factories, announce job creation figures, pose for photographs at ribbon-cuttings, and congratulate themselves when businesses invest in their states.
Then some of those same politicians turn around and speak about the people who built those businesses as though they were a national problem requiring immediate government intervention.
They want the jobs.
They want the investment.
They want the tax revenue.
They just seem to have a problem with the people responsible for producing it. And then they wonder why businesses consider moving somewhere else.
Here’s another thought.
America has never promised that everybody will end up with the same amount of money.
It has promised something much more important: the opportunity to pursue a better life.
That opportunity has never been perfect. There have always been barriers, injustices, and people who needed a fairer chance.
We should work to remove those barriers.
But the goal ought to be helping more Americans succeed, not making success itself a target.
That’s the distinction I wish more politicians understood.
And it’s why Brian Kilmeade’s exchange with Ro Khanna struck such a familiar chord.
For all the years I spent with Rush, one of the things I admired most was his understanding of what made America exceptional.
He believed in the extraordinary possibilities available to ordinary people.
He celebrated ambition. He celebrated invention. He celebrated the idea that somebody could start with very little and build something remarkable.
And he refused to accept the notion that Americans should feel guilty about wanting to do better.
I think about that whenever I hear politicians describe wealth as though it were a crime scene.
A successful entrepreneur is not automatically a villain.
A struggling young American is not automatically a victim of that entrepreneur.
And a government that makes achievement harder is not necessarily making life easier for anybody else.
We need more people building businesses, creating jobs, inventing products, and taking chances.
We need more young Americans who believe their futures can be better than their parents’ futures.
And we need political leaders who understand that opportunity isn’t created by teaching people to resent success.
I wish Washington would catch up.
Because the American dream was never about making sure nobody gets ahead.
It was about making sure everybody has a chance to try.
— Bo
Listen to Rush Hour with James Golden weekdays on the Red Apple Audio Networks, or catch the podcast on Red Apple Podcast Network and your favorite podcast app.
