Will Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani try to make it to Gracie Mansion on a platform scapegoating — and even calling to eliminate — billionaires? The candidate on “Meet the Press” says, “I don’t think that we should have billionaires because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality.”

That’s an odd statement for a would-be mayor of New York to make. After all, the mighty economic engine that is New York City was built in large measure by its billionaires, not its politicians, who sometimes impoverished the city. New York currently has 123 billionaires, the most of any city in the world.

New York, too, uniquely among the world’s greatest cities, was only very briefly the capital of a country. Thus the cultural glories of New York — its museums, its libraries, its universities, its concert halls, and its opera houses — were not built with state resources as the British Museum and the Paris Opera were. 

Instead, they were largely built (and paid for) by the private philanthropy of billionaires. Just think of Rockefeller University,  Carnegie Hall, and the Cooper Union.

New York’s current billionaires are just as philanthropy-oriented as were the past ones. Medical students at both Albert Einstein College of Medicine and NYU go there tuition-free thanks to billionaires.

So what’s the far left’s problem with billionaires other than that they have vast wealth that the far left would like to spend? While, to be sure, one should never underestimate leftist cynicism and powerlust, they also often simply confuse money and wealth as Mr. Mamdani evidently did on “Meet the Press.” 

They’re not the same thing, though. Money is only a catalyst, a means to facilitate transactions. And transactions are to an economy what atoms are to chemistry, the fundamental unit. A transaction is an exchange between two parties that benefits — an important point — both parties. 

Because both sides of a transaction feel themselves better off after the transaction — otherwise it wouldn’t take place — transactions by definition create wealth. Last year Americans created $27 trillion worth of new wealth. We call it the gross domestic product.

Now, to be sure, wealth can be held in the form of money. 

When I was a child my favorite comic book character was Scrooge McDuck, Donald Duck’s fabulously wealthy uncle. Scrooge kept his billions in a vast money bin (it measured a wonderfully meaningless three cubic acres in size) and got his exercise by happily swimming through the coins and bills. 

One can be forgiven for thinking that leftists — Senator Sanders comes to mind — believe this is how all billionaires store their wealth.

Money, however, is static. It just sits there doing nothing — indeed it likely slowly loses value thanks to inflation. Billionaires, though, do not sit on their wealth. Instead the vast majority of it is invested in enterprises, such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, that both employ and sell to millions of people. 

Employees exchanging labor for money and customers exchanging money for products are both making transactions, creating wealth in the process as transactions must by definition.

Amazon, for instance, has 1.1 million employees in this country and more than 300 million customers, a staggering 88 percent of the American population. Amazon’s share of the wealth created last year was $59.2 billion net profit. 

How much wealth accrued to the employees and customers is impossible to quantify, but they all transacted with Amazon of their own free will. They must have thought they made a good deal or they wouldn’t have made it.

So Amazon, like all successful corporations, is a giant wealth-creation machine for its billionaire owner, its employees, and its customers alike. Why would anyone object to people creating, and thereby benefitting from, such glorious wealth machines that greatly benefit so many other people as well?

Worse, there are only two ways to get rid of billionaires — and fortunately the mayor of New York doesn’t have the power to use either of them. 

Either way would assure that there would be no more billionaires in the future, and thus no future Amazons and Microsofts that would make life better for the rest of us.

He could tax away their wealth, forcing them to sell stock to pay the taxes. Yet that would cause corporate stock prices to collapse, gravely injuring financially not only the billionaires, but the vast number of ordinary investors, and the beneficiaries of pension funds, 401K, IRA, and annuity accounts invested in those stocks.

The other way would be to simply seize what Marx termed the means of production. In 2021, when running for a state assembly seat in Queens, Mamdani said he was in favor of seizing the means of production.

That, of course, would also financially damage millions of ordinary investors along with the billionaire founders. If the history of the modern world has proved anything, it is that governments are everywhere and always incompetent at running businesses. 

Now that Mr. Mamdani has clinched the Democratic nomination for mayor, all voters — and not just the city’s billionaires — will want to bear that caution in mind.