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Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos explained in an interview on Wednesday why he thinks socialism is gaining traction among some politicians and voters, and what he thinks they’re getting wrong.
Bezos spoke on the factory floor of Blue Origin’s Space Coast facility with Fox News’ Bret Baier in an interview that aired on “Special Report” and was asked about the factors driving some to embrace socialism.
“One, we do have real affordability problems. So people look at the cost of housing, for example, and it’s very expensive. And so you can’t pretend that there are no problems,” Bezos said. “I don’t think we should underestimate the problems, but we should also look at what the real solutions are.”
Bezos said that housing is an important example because it’s “a place where a lot of the government intervention that’s happened has been counterproductive. Instead of working on the real solution, it’s very common for, in the case of housing, certain politicians to point at landlords and say this is the fault of greedy landlords.”
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“This isn’t what’s going on. Housing is a simple supply and demand situation. It’s econ 101,” he said, adding that “if you put in place government programs that subsidize demand and constrain supply, you are going to get high prices.”
“If you can look at a counterexample, which is Austin, where over the last 10 years they’ve implemented many policies designed to make it easier to build houses, and they have housing prices going down in Austin,” Bezos said.
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He added that when voters are filling out their ballots, they should think about whether a politician is more focused on offering solutions to problems or pointing fingers to cast blame on their opponents.
“If there’s a politician who’s picking villains and pointing fingers, that probably means they don’t have a solution. Because if that is a solution, instead of blaming somebody, they would be working on the solution,” Bezos said.
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The Amazon and Blue Origin founder added that if someone at one of his companies were to come into meetings and “instead of working on a root cause and a root fix and a real solution to the problem, all they did was point fingers and blame people, we’d exit them very quickly. Those people wouldn’t be in our company for long.”
Bezos was also asked about criticisms of billionaires made by political figures on the left of the ideological spectrum, and pushed back on the mentality of casting successful entrepreneurs as villains.
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He said that he thinks there is an environment in which some people have been taught “this whole kind of oppressor-oppressed framework and that success is villainy. Success is not villainy.”
