Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (known as "AOC," but only to people of whom she approves and YOU ARE NOT ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE), believes that in a free-market economy the only way people get rich is if they take money from others.

This is completely and thoroughly wrong.

This zero-sum ridiculousness most recently came up as part of AOC's -- I'm sorry, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez's -- "ask me anything" Instagram stories when she was asked to explain why she believes that billionaires shouldn't exist.

Her answer is that we shouldn't have billionaires as long as there are people who aren't billionaires.

To be precise, her position is that there shouldn't be billionaires while we have income inequality, specifically people who are very poor. This only makes sense if you believe billionaires' very existence is keeping other people down when not only do the two have nothing to do with each other, but quite the opposite is true.

The reality is, billionaires create wealth through innovation, new ideas, hard work, and ambition. It is not a zero-sum game which is a hallmark of Marxist economic thinking in which you can only have a larger piece of the economic pie if someone else gets a smaller piece.

The truth is that in a free market economy (which America still kind of has), not only do entrepreneurs make the pie bigger, but they end up with only a fraction of the growth of the pie they created. Yes, that fraction is huge to an individual, but regardless, the benefits are distributed far and wide.

As economist Deirdre McCloskey has explained,

"Those cameras that are pointing at us are by historical standards, they're ridiculously small. These are high-quality cameras that do as good a job as an enormous TV camera, much better job than a TV camera and even better than the great big film camera in the 1930s. There they are, and that's, the first person to think of this made a ton of money, but actually in the end the inventors don't make that much. They make about 2 percent of the social gain, which, if you're Steve Jobs is a lot of money, but still 98 percent goes to us, the consumers."

As explicated by the Washington Examiner's Brad Polumbo,

"Rather, in order to become a billionaire, Jobs had to spark the creation of 2 million jobs across the United States, nearly 450,000 through suppliers and roughly 1.5 million more indirectly through a retail ecosystem. Moreover, Jobs had to oversee the development and distribution of products that have improved all of our lives immeasurably."

But according to Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, it's immoral that such people even exist.

"I'm not saying that Bill Gates or Warren Buffett are immoral, but a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don't have access to public health is wrong."

"…a system that allows…"

Let that roll around in your head a bit. The premise of such a statement is that the government permits action. You are not free to do as you please, save for those rights you have consented to grant to the state the better to secure your liberty. No, power resides in the state which allows you to do things, and among the things Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez believes it should not "allow," is for you to have too much success.

She apparently sees no such issues in granting the government too much power. Can it ever have enough?

And she does not address the disincentives she would create when the state essentially "disallows" billionaires which would presumably be accomplished by taxing them into oblivion. No Amazon. No Apple. No Netflix.

No Standard Oil, Westinghouse, Ford, or GE, for that matter.

But then, what do you want? Dan "every billionaire is a policy failure" Riffle is an advisor.

And yes, he trademarked "every billionaire is a policy failure."

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez does make some good points above regarding the favors powerful interests extract from the government to further enhance their wealth and power, and yet she doesn't seem to understand that the only reason billionaires and other special interests go to the government for favors is because the government has favors to grant in the first place. Remove the wealth-distributing powers from the government and you reduce the lobbying industry to a handful of $2,000 suits scrambling for defense contracts with the rest looking to pick up scraps in highway construction and GAO print jobs.

Not so great for the local Ferrari dealerships, but pretty good for the rest of us.