Believe it or not, conservatives have always had an uneasy relationship with capitalism.
In short, after centuries of debate, many of us have accepted it as the least of all possible evils.
Thus, even in an age of populist-nationalist sentiment, symbolized (at least in spirit) by President Donald Trump’s political ascendancy, a conservative Christian, without abandoning Christianity’s warnings against worshipping wealth, may largely nod along in agreement with Amazon mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos, who provided a sound explanation of why Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had it wrong earlier this month when she declared that no one can “earn” a billion dollars.
“It’s not correct on its face,” Bezos said in an interview Wednesday with CNBC’s Andrew Sorkin that was posted to the social media platform X. “Let me give you a simple example. Let’s say you start a burger joint, and you have 10 employees, and you make a little bit of money.[:40]
“And by the way, these are the most delicious burgers in the world. People love your burgers, Andrew. And so then, you open a second outlet,” the Amazon founder added.
Sorkin stayed largely quiet, allowing his interviewee to develop the example.
“And now you’re making a little bit more money, and you have 20 employees,” Bezos continued. “And you open a third outlet. By the time you’ve opened a thousand outlets, you are a billionaire.”
Then, after citing several real-life examples in the restaurant industry, Bezos posed the only relevant question.
“At what point did that money all of a sudden become unethical, or it didn’t?” he asked.
Indeed, therein lies the rub. After all, who can say, based on a blanket statement about all people in a certain wealth category, that unethical behavior alone explains their wealth?
“What you’re doing — the way — the way you make a billion dollars, or a hundred million dollars, or ten million dollars, or anything, is you create a service that people love. And if millions of people choose your service, you’re going to end up with a billion dollars,” Bezos added.
Jeff Bezos explains to @AOC how billionaires are created: providing at least a billion dollars in value to society — the opposite of exploitation.
Bezos: “Let me give you a simple example. Let’s say you start a burger joint, and you have 10 employees, and you make a little bit… pic.twitter.com/qGjGdoJcbr
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) May 20, 2026
Sorkin, of course, posed the question because AOC, in a May 7 podcast appearance, insisted that wealth accumulation in the billions of dollars amounts to theft.
“You can’t earn a billion dollars,” she said, according to USA Today. “You just can’t earn that. You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that.”
So where should conservatives’ sympathies lie? With the liberal founder of Amazon — a company that has revolutionized commerce — or the socialist congresswoman?
Our sympathies should always lie with those who, in our imperfect judgments, speak truth. And in this case, Bezos spoke more truth than AOC did.
Honest conservatives, of course, know that Bezos’s theory of wealth accumulation sanitized the real-life process. After all, history abounds with tales of moguls who stooped to shockingly unethical levels.
Still, we also know what “you didn’t earn that” or “you didn’t build that” means in the mouth of a dim-witted leftist. It means “a billionaire’s money should belong to the socialist revolutionaries who would use the coercive power of the state to confiscate wealth for themselves under the guise of redistributing it to the people.”
Indeed, we have already seen what happens when wealth concentrates in proximity to the federal government. It improves no one’s lives except those of the leftist oligarchs it enriches.
At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England, opposition to industrial capitalism came not from urban liberal types but from rural conservatives who recognized its labor-crushing and wealth-concentrating tendencies as threats to the stability and independence of traditional Christian families and homes.
In other words, capitalism, like all things of this world, comes with a cost.
Still, because we know what AOC and other socialists mean by “you didn’t earn that,” we pay the cost and thereby live with capitalism as preferable to the evils that bloodthirsty leftists would impose on us if they could.
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