We’ve all seen the memes:

“You do not earn a billion dollars. You steal it. Nobody works a billion times harder than a nurse, a teacher or a farmer. That wealth comes from underpaying the people who actually did the work.”

The other end of the spectrum is the slogan:

“None of your problems are because someone else is a billionaire.”

Or now, trillionaire.

Both are equally untrue and just as economically ignorant. But perhaps the latter is even more strategically damaging to the future of a genuine free market.

Elon Musk has taken in at least $38 billion in subsidies and federal contracts, not counting the $1.5 billion EV subsidy Tesla took advantage of from President Barack Obama’s 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The ARRA gave a $7,500 per vehicle subsidy to electric vehicle purchases.

In total, that $39.5 billion in subsidies amounts to $470 for every one of the 84.2 million American families. That means the average family is $470 poorer because of Elon Musk.

Billionaire and trillionaire sycophants counter that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin and the other super-wealthy provide services to the American government, that these services are “worth it,” and that if they hadn’t provided the services or taken the subsidies someone else would have. Arguing that government green electronic vehicle subsidies and contracts for spy satellites that facilitate warrantless surveillance of the American people are “worth it” sounds a lot like an argument a leftist greenie and a loyalist of the military-industrial complex would make, respectively. It’s definitely not an argument in favor of a true free market. Interestingly, most of the richest billionaires are in the tech sector, and their contracts are typically with the military and intelligence agencies.

All of this is not to paint Elon Musk as some unique super-villain. To his credit, he has publicly called for some of the subsidies to end and did the world a solid when he released the #TwitterFiles to expose government censorship. But in general, the billionaires have been the largest recipients of tax largesse, and employ platoons of lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists to get those contracts and subsidies, including Musk’s companies. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon has more than half a dozen billion-dollar-plus contracts with the federal government right now, and has used those contracts to censor critics of the state, like when his Amazon Web Services shut down the conservative social media site Parler in 2021. Google (Sergey Brin and Larry Page) also participated in this censorship of Parler on behalf of the incoming Joe Biden administration, and has many contracts with the federal government worth billions, including a recent $200 million contract with US.. intelligence services signed in April. I could go down the list of all the richest billionaires in America, and how their companies are dependent upon government contracts for much of their wealth.

Conservatives and even many libertarians tend to castigate welfare recipients among the poor but champion billionaires as pillars of capitalism. But this is a mistake in principle, and more importantly it’s a grave tactical error if free market distortions are ever to be tamped down. No amount of scapegoating of the poor will ever endanger warrantless surveillance, a war for oil, or any other serious threat to our freedoms. Scapegoating the poor probably won’t even lower the level of money being put out for welfare very much, considering the voting demographics.

The average American taxpayer may be made a bit poorer because of the food stamp program, but unlike billionaire contracts, Americans are not made less free by an individual family on food stamps. Moreover, the per-person scale is off the charts larger for billionaires. Poor people receive an average of $715 per month for a family of four on food stamps. Even if that family stayed on food stamps for forty years it wouldn’t amount to a tenth of a penny for each family across the US. Cumulatively, the SNAP program costs taxpayers a little over $100 billion annually for its 41.7 million recipients. Put another way, Elon Musk alone has absorbed more of your tax dollars than fifteen million recipients of food stamps this year.

The key difference here is that subsidies for billionaires take away core freedoms of all American families, while SNAP benefits just feed poor families. While the latter is not a proper function of government and brings its own market distortions, there’s no danger of food stamps taking away our right to privacy by facilitating warrantless surveillance, starting undeclared wars, or engineering silent political censorship. But subsidies of billionaires definitely does those things, and has done all of those things.

So why should the right and libertarians continue their focus on food stamps and not instead focus on crony subsidies?

Tactically, focusing on billionaire subsidies rather than welfare for the poor is the best way to repeal programs, anyway. Voting demographics are such that ending subsidies for billionaires can likely be put to an end; billionaires have very few votes in an election, even when you add in their employees to the numbers. A concentrated effort to end billionaire subsidies has a much better chance of winning electorally than campaigning against the vast numbers of people on welfare.

No poor voter, and very few middle class voters, have any financial incentive to continue subsidies to billionaires. These subsidies persist because the attention of the masses is directed elsewhere to endless, mindless and fruitless discussions (on the Left) about how billionaires supposedly aren’t taxed enough and (on the Right) about immigration or how great billionaires are in bringing products like government spy satellites to market.

Billionaires own both parties in Washington; there’s no danger of progressives winning and confiscating the wealth of billionaires through the tax system. Sure, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has her “wealth tax” gimmick as an election sop to the economically ignorant, but nobody in Washington takes seriously the chances of it ever getting enacted. And few voters outside of die-hard progressives take her proposal seriously either.

But government subsidy of billionaires and their companies is an ideology that is alive, and a direct, real and ongoing threat to American’s freedoms. It’s time people across the political spectrum join forces in an ad hoc manner and demand an end to cronyism. Such an alliance is possible. The honest Left (those not in the Washington DC beltway) are nominally against subsidizing billionaires, so a populist coalition across the political spectrum to end these subsidies is quite possible if conservatives and libertarians are willing.