How wrong can you be? Let me count the ways.

Robert Reich used to be an interesting commenter or essayists though with a profoundly wrong worldview. He struck me as a good person with bad analysis. He seems to have been slipping, or my tolerance has been declining.

The obviousness of how factually wrong is this argument is astonishing. I can see how you might wish it to be true but I do not see how anyone can make the case empirically.

There are basically 5 ways to accumulate a billion dollars in America:
1) Profiting from a monopoly
2) Insider-trading
3) Political payoffs
4) Fraud
5) Inheritance

None of these has anything to do with being successful in the supposed free market.

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) November 10, 2019

Click for the refutations.

Off the top of my head:

1) Profiting from a monopoly - This is the second closest in the list to being a true statement but it simply isn't very true. Corporations can and do become wealthy through regulatory manipulation and state-sanctioned monopolies, but rarely do the private or big personal fortunes occur through this mechanism. Or not in the normal meaning. The big tech fortunes do accumulate wealth through the artificial monopoly of patents and brand creation but no one is recommending we get rid of patents. Reform them, certainly, but not get rid of them. Patents create a large incentive for innovation. There are very few natural monopolies though. Those that are sustained are almost always due to a statist regulatory system and are a net drag on productivity. The reality of state created artificial monopolies is one of the bigger arguments for limiting state power. Kind of counter to Reich's inclinations.

2) Insider-trading - A few millionaires perhaps but rarely if ever billionaires. Vanishingly infrequent at scale.

3) Political payoffs - See the regulatory state and imposed monopolies in item one. Imposed monopolies sometimes created through lobbying/payoffs. But very few personal fortunes in the billions through political payoffs. Again, the most obvious examples, such as Gore and Clinton, are exactly the players closest to Reich.

4) Fraud - Not any of the big fortunes. Small ones, sure. Can't think of one big personal fortune which was created via sustained fraud. The closest we come are some of the fortunes in finance which are created by skirting the edges of the regulatory system rather than blatant fraud. But again, these are fortunes measured in the tens or hundreds of millions, not in the billions. Did Michael Milliken commit fraud? Probably, but most of the controversy was more about how close he sailed to the legal winds rather than actual fraud per se.

5) Inheritance - This is the argument which is most defendable but still not very accurate. My recollection is that only about 20% or so of the Fortune 400 are on there from inheritance (either from parent or from spouse).

How can such a prominent person publish such demonstrable nonsense?

It is a puzzle.