AOC is not a polymath
Jim Thompson
By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist
AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) claimed this week that no one can earn $ 1 billion, proving she is no polymath (an individual whose expertise spans multiple, diverse fields, often combining profound knowledge in areas like science, art and philosophy to solve complex problems).
Hey, AOC, give me a call, and I will tell you about the billionaires I have known.
Exhibit One died when he was 95. He was a third-generation billionaire living in a beautiful home built by his grandfather on an island in a river in mid-Wisconsin.
After he remodeled the kitchen (for ~$500,000+), he invited me to dinner to show it off. After that, I had dinner with him once a year.
One time, he let me pick up a shotgun which had just been appraised at $100,000. That was quite a delight. You don’t know him, but you know what he did. His company produced all the paper for "LIFE," "LOOK" and "Reader’s Digest."
He is gone, as I said before, and so is his company. The money is in a trust, and which largely spends its time and money looking for depleted farmland to restore to native conditions.
Exhibit Two is a second-generation billionaire. His father and uncle survived Hitler’s Holocaust and emigrated to Australia.
He came to the U.S. in the early 1990s to build a box business here. I have monitored the construction of six paperboard mills here for him (Conyers, Ga.; Staten Island, N.Y.; Shreveport, La.; Valparaiso, Ind.; Wapakoneta, Ohio; and Henderson, Ky.).
When I started working with him, there were about 125 employees in the U.S. Now there are 15,000 good-paying U.S. jobs in his company of which he is the sole owner. His personal wealth has grown 10 times or more since I met him.
AOC is symptomatic of the politicians in this country. They have no business experience. The only way they know to get funds is through taxes.
They think any discussion of wealth is a zero-sum game. You take it from one party and give it to another.
That is not how you grow wealth. Growing wealth is done by finding a need that people have and producing a product or service that will fill that need.
You are trading your intellectual and physical abilities – plus likely some other raw materials – to make something that people will pay you more for than they cost you.
Henry Ford drove the price of a Model T from nearly $1,000 to around $280 in a few years. In the same time period, he raised his factory employee wages from about $2.50 to $5 per day, an unheard-of sum at that time.
He had to hire more workers because he was selling more cars. Also at the same time, he became a wealthy man.
Mr. Ford used his intellectual prowess to wring this value for everyone (customers, employees, himself) out of his enterprise.
If you want to find me, you can, AOC. I will be awaiting your call, and I will be happy to explain this to you.
Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.