By David N. Harding, Staff Writer
There’s a phrase I’ve heard thrown around a lot lately— “pay your fair share.” It’s become a kind of moral cudgel, aimed squarely at the wealthy, particularly billionaires like Elon Musk. But what’s rarely questioned is the axiomatic flaw beneath this argument: the assumption that wealth is a fixed pie—that if someone has more, it must mean someone else has less.
This kind of thinking is more than just bad economics. It’s what Musk himself calls the “fixed pie fallacy,” and it’s one of the clearest examples of what he refers to as the liberal mind-virus: a collection of well-meaning but deeply misguided ideas that confuse envy for justice and punish success under the guise of fairness.
“The ‘fixed pie’ fallacy is at the heart of much wrong-headed economic thinking,” Musk posted in 2024. “There is essentially infinite potential for job and company creation. Think of all the things that didn’t exist 20 or 30 years ago!”
That’s the point. The economy is not static. It’s dynamic. Wealth can be created. Jobs can be invented. Technologies can transform entire industries. But if your foundational belief—your axiom—is that the pie is fixed, then any individual’s success looks like theft. And that belief, more than any tax policy or slogan, is what poisons our national conversation around wealth.
I’m not here to defend every billionaire. I’m not even here to defend Elon Musk, though I find many of his views refreshingly honest in a world driven by manufactured outrage. What I am here to do is challenge the axiom itself.
When Musk said, “When someone says billionaires don’t pay their fair share, what they’re really saying is: ‘I don’t understand how value is created,’” he wasn’t being dismissive—he was diagnosing the root of a dangerous cultural shift. If we continue to operate as though wealth is finite and success is immoral, then we will destroy the very engine that lifts people out of poverty: innovation, risk-taking, and entrepreneurship.
Let’s put this into perspective. Musk’s wealth isn’t sitting in a bank vault—it’s tied to companies that build cars, rockets, satellites, and jobs. If Tesla fails, Musk loses. If SpaceX fails, thousands of employees and contractors lose. His wealth is value—value created by and dependent on other people’s success. That’s the kind of wealth we should aspire to encourage, not demonize.
And yet, this “fair share” narrative persists, often without any clear definition of what “fair” even means. It’s not about numbers. It’s about resentment. It’s about assuming that wealth is suspicious unless sanctioned by the state or distributed through bureaucracy. That’s not justice. That’s envy dressed up as morality.
“You can’t help the poor by attacking the rich,” Musk said. “You help the poor by creating more opportunity, more innovation, more expansion. But that requires freedom, not envy.”
That’s the lesson we need to reclaim. True fairness doesn’t come from punishing those who succeed—it comes from removing the barriers that keep others from succeeding as well.
So, the next time someone says, “Someone needs to pay their fair share,” I’d challenge them to ask: Are we trying to shrink the pie and redistribute it, or are we trying to grow the pie so there’s more to go around? Because only one of those paths leads to real prosperity.
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