Amazon founder Jeff Bezos gestures as he speaks at the main panel of Italian Tech Week 2025 in Turin, Italy, October 3, 2025. (Remo Casilli/Reuters)

Entrepreneurs’ access to public goods does not make them unworthy of the value they create.

There’s no doubt that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos earned his fortune, and it’s easy to see how the value his work has created has benefited modern society. Amazon has saved people many hours and many dollars. Basic arithmetic shows that his fortune represents only a fraction of the value created for others.

But that is not the only defense of his wealth. There is also a moral defense rooted in economic justice. It rests on ownership, discovery, choice, and responsibility.

When I recently wrote about Bezos’s value creation in the Wall Street Journal, some readers objected that Bezos did not build Amazon ...

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