Tina and Elon

Last week, two momentous things happened. Tina Peters was released from jail, and Elon Musk became a trillionaire. Both aroused intense hatred from the usual suspects, who I’ll refer to globally as “Leftists.”

A “leftist” as I define them includes but is not limited to communists, socialists, Democrats, anarchists, RINO Republicans, Deep State bureaucrats, brainwashed students, and paid-off media.

I wrote about both on X, not expecting the vitriol I received. I thought the leftists had all ditched X for BlueSky, but apparently not. They came out in droves to say nasty things about Tina and Elon. Here is a sample comment, cleaned up to remove the bad words: “XXXX XXX you XXXXXX XXXX!”

In Tina’s case, I am grateful she was finally released. I am less happy about the conditions. The issue isn’t really the conditions themselves — it’s that there are conditions at all. Without re-litigating the case here: as far as I’m concerned, she is completely innocent of any crime. So any limitation on her personal conduct or activity is onerous.

It’s better that she is out of jail than inside it, but she must still comply with the following:

• Can’t leave Colorado without permission (what if she is invited to the White House?)

• Cannot own a firearm (a 2A violation for an innocent person)

• No illegal drugs (as if)

• Must enroll and participate in a “cognitive therapy program” (what on earth? Are we the Soviet Union now?)

• Must get a job or enroll in a full-time educational/vocational program (an insult)

• Cannot contact anyone from the Mesa County Clerk’s office (how does she manage her appeal of her conviction without access to witnesses?)

Any violation, and she can be sent back to jail.

My view is that the crimes compounding on the heads of the people who arranged for Peters’s incarceration are still accumulating — just more slowly now. On top of that, there are the legions of leftists who now seem to think it’s their duty to harass and annoy her.

As I wrote in my X post, Peters should get a statue on the National Mall.

Meanwhile, a very different kind of injustice was directed at Elon Musk. At least on paper, Musk became a trillionaire last week with the SpaceX IPO. Naturally, that doesn’t mean he actually has a trillion dollars sitting in a bank account. To get there, he’d have to trade his assets for cash — but doing that would crash their value almost instantly and drop their collective worth well below a trillion dollars. Regardless, leftists think he is a trillionaire and want him to surrender his money.

It’s worth noting who doesn’t get this treatment. Leftists love to complain about billionaires as a class — except, conveniently, when the billionaire in question is seen as one of their own. Bezos, Gates, Soros, and Zuckerberg are every bit as wealthy as Musk, yet they’re given a pass. The hatred aimed at Musk isn’t really about the size of his fortune. It’s about which side he’s perceived to be on.

The left’s reaction to Musk reminds me of something I read in a Chinese autobiography about the Cultural Revolution — I believe it was Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng (an excellent book), though I’ve read several of these and may be misremembering the source.

In the book, China nationalized a factory but kept the founder and former owner on as a laborer. They needed him, because he was the only person who knew how to run the place. The communists made one poor decision after another, and the company became far less productive than it had been.

It was a sad story. The man knew he would die as a laborer while watching the total destruction of his life’s work — destroyed by a pack of imbecilic mad dogs too dim to realize that by consuming his creation, they were devouring the very infrastructure that produced value in the first place.

This is what leftists seem to want from Elon and every other extraordinarily wealthy person — just not the ones they’ve decided are on their side. They want to seize the equivalent of someone’s net worth in cash and redistribute it to the needy (themselves). What they don’t seem to grasp is that doing so would destroy the underlying companies, throw even more people into unemployment, and reduce overall productivity.

They also don’t seem to understand that you don’t “make” money by printing it. That was Joe Biden’s delusion, and it’s how you get inflation. What people like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates actually do — whatever you think of their politics — is create value through productivity. Their money is a measure of real goods and capabilities that didn’t exist before.

That’s the critical difference: paper that represents value versus things that are intrinsically valuable, like buildings, robots, books, and software. Money is worthless without the goods it’s based on — but those goods have value whether or not money changes hands.

Still, as soon as Musk becomes visibly wealthier, leftists want to take his stuff. It’s the mentality of a criminal. And the reactions to Tina Peters are the reactions of thugs.

My conclusion: leftists are thugs and criminals, or they’re comfortable letting thugs and criminals represent them.