This is the Libertarian Podcast at the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church and the Libertarian is Professor Richard Epstein.

Long-time listeners know that Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution.

He's the Lawrence A. Tish Professor of Law at NYU and is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

Richard, today I want to ask you about some perhaps excessive moves from the political left

and the political right.

So let's start on the left because as you pointed out in your column this week, the existence of billionaires makes some people uncomfortable.

You noted the New York Times magazine dedicated a bunch of print to the idea that, well, there

might be too many of them, and I like the quote that you highlighted

highlighted which was their numbers are out of control and the rest of us are

subject to their whims. Now President Biden's out there proposing a billionaire's

tax Democrats control the House, the Senate, and the presidency.

How much should I worry about billionaires growing in number? I mean, how powerful are they really?

I mean, worried about this as a social matter matter my attitude has always been exactly the same the more the merrier

There's a kind of a deep important theorem here as to how sort of classical liberals like myself look at wealth differentials and how people on the left do.

My view about this is you start with an individual distribution and in many cases it will be quite

malaportion.

And indeed it generally is the case as you start allowing people to play roles in the marketplace.

The spreads that will observe, that you'll observe will actually get larger, not small.

But the thing to remember under these circumstances,

even those people who grow the least under these situations

actually grow.

...