The war on billionaires ignores more than $2 billion from the Anschutz Foundation

By Wayne Laugesen | Commentary, Wayne’s Word

Bernie Sanders said it in four words: “Billionaires should not exist.”¹ 

The Senate’s counterfeit Indian, Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, said we shouldn’t have billionaires. Then she went on “The View” and griped that billionaires “have enough money to shoot themselves into space” because they don’t pay enough taxes.² And Democratic Socialist U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, hired an adviser whose Twitter name was “Every billionaire is a policy failure.”³

The pitch never changes. Their mountain of loot is the reason your pile is small. Given control, they will steal the money billionaires and centimillionaires use to improve the human condition.

It’s an old con. It works because envy is easier to produce than goods, services, commodities, and paychecks.

A dollar is paper. It can’t feed a child or set a broken bone. What matters is who puts it to work and how. A politician wants it in the treasury, with clever claims that it somehow benefits us all. A builder turns it into jobs, a hospital wing, a rocket, or a phone so cheap it rings inside a homeless man’s shanty.

I heard a man say, “Steve Jobs did not get rich by stealing iPhones from the poor.” He got rich by making a phone people wanted. The first iPhone cost $499 in 2007,⁴ which equals about $800 today, adjusted for inflation. A low-end smartphone now costs less than a tank of gas.

In the early 1990s, cell phones were a status symbol. Billionaires found ways to sell them to everyone. This hit home in the mid 1990s when I walked through a Boulder alley filled with homeless people and heard a phone ring inside a refrigerator box someone was using as a temporary dwelling. 

I thought about how much a phone could help someone who lives on the street. I also contemplated the miners, factory hands, truck drivers, store clerks, and engineers — anyone along the supply chain — who stood to benefit from the mass availability of wireless phones.

Similar math applies to fancy weddings and bar mitzvahs the envy shysters despise. Nobody burns cash at a million-dollar party. It pays a florist, a baker, a band, and a dishwasher, as well as a bartender working a double. The guests may be rich. The people cashing the checks are not and are quite thankful for earning income.

Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz, who employed me for 14 years, exemplifies how we need innovators and risk takers who create enough value to earn billions in cash — money that has no value until they put it to work.

Anschutz made money in oil, railroads, and arenas, as well as The Broadmoor and too many other profitable ventures to list. To his credit, he often invests where profit is not the prime objective. He and his family’s gifts helped turn the old Fitzsimons Army post in Aurora into the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Prior to his investment, the university hospital was a run-down last resort for the destitute. Today it is one of the country’s most respected hospitals. It still serves the poor. It also serves wealthy patients who travel thousands of miles to see hard-to-find experts.

By 2018, the Anschutz Foundation had given the campus nearly $300 million.⁵ Recently, it put up another $50 million for mental health care — a challenge designed to pull in $200 million. Half went to Children’s Hospital Colorado.⁶ 

Anschutz gives, asking nothing in return, and humanity reaps the reward.

A child in crisis does not care what socialists think of a donor’s net worth. He needs a bed. One of my family’s six young men is educated, married with children, and working a high-wage job, in his early 20s, only because a facility Anschutz established saved his life when he was a teenager.

The foundation started in 1984 and gave away more than $2 billion by 2018.⁷ It pays almost the whole budget of the American Museum of Western Art in Denver.⁸ Anschutz owns newspapers, including The Gazette in Colorado Springs and Denver. A newsroom is a bad way to make money, but it is a good way to keep a Fourth Estate check on socialists, authoritarians, and tyranny.

^{Newly popular socialist politicians, teachers, and activists demonize producers who sustain charities, create jobs, and solve countless societal problems. (From left to right: Nancy Anschutz, Philip Anschutz, Dede Laugesen, and Wayne Laugesen when the National Western Stock Show gave Mr. Anschutz the Citizen of the West award.)}

Socialists love to use the success of Elon Musk to generate envy. Warren’s space jab left out a few key facts that sabotage her case. The space shuttle retired in 2011. For the next nine years, our country could not launch its own astronauts. NASA bought seats on Russian rockets at prices that climbed past $80 million each.⁹ In May 2020, a capsule built by Musk’s SpaceX carried Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the space station. A billionaire empowered us to stop hitchhiking with a sketchy driver.

NASA says hiring private companies such as SpaceX has saved taxpayers up to $30 billion¹⁰ — money that can improve the country’s social safety net. NASA’s own moon rocket and capsule cost about $4.1 billion each time they launch.¹¹ Musk’s reusable Falcon 9 rocket flies for a tiny fraction of that. Without Musk, American astronauts would still rent seats from Moscow, who could turn us away on a whim.

^{Socialists say our country should not have innovators like Elon Musk, pictured here. (Wikipedia Commons)}

Andrew Carnegie, the rich industrialist and philanthropist from the Gilded Age, paid for 2,509 public libraries.¹² 

The Bill Gates foundation has spent billions on bed nets, drugs, and vaccines to fight malaria. The disease killed 864,000 people in 2000 and about 610,000 in 2024.¹³ For African children, that is the life-saving benefit of a fortune invested rather than a fortune seized by soak-the-rich taxation imposed by socialists pandering for votes in the developed world.

In Ayn Rand’s classic “Atlas Shrugged,” now a film trilogy on Netflix,¹⁴ the political class — exploiting irrational envy — called industrialists moral failures. Aimless handouts were considered more beneficial than railroads. So, in the book, the productive class decide to vanish into a hidden Colorado valley called Galt’s Gulch. There they live beyond the reach of rules politicians impose for envious competitors. 

We aren’t there yet. We are in the stage at which campaign speeches treat producers as criminals and their customers as victims. If we elect more of these socialists we’ll need a real Galt’s Gulch.

Poverty is real. A broken school, a fentanyl market, a negligent father, and other counterproductive liabilities cause poverty. A man and his family who fund state-of-the-art hospital care do not. The money in a producer’s account has no intrinsic value. It’s like oil before the internal-combustion engine. Before someone found a way to use the oil, the oil had no value.

Most billionaires put idle cash to work for the very people Sanders and other socialists claim to care about. They say these social benefactors should not exist. Tell it to children surrounded by physicians who work day and night to save their lives.

It’s time to rethink the war on billionaires before enough socialists take power and reallocate hard-earned fortunes away from organizations that serve humanity.

READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT WAYNE’S WORD

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.