Yaron Brook, Don Watkins: When It Comes to Wealth Creation, There Is No Pie

Wealth grows. True. But the pie metaphor carries with it another implication, which Roberts doesn’t challenge. It treats wealth as owned by society. We happen to find ourselves in possession of a pie. How did it get here? That’s never made too clear, but it’s here, and now we have to decide how to divide it up fairly.

In accepting the pie metaphor, we concede a moral point that should not be conceded. Wealth does not arise from an amorphous social process; “society” owns no pie.

Wealth is created by, and morally belongs to the individual creator. As Rand observes, since “man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.”