Hitting back against presidential candidate Bernie Sanders's assertion that billionaires should not exist - and his calls to tax their wealth at much higher rates - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, worth $70bn, took to Fox News to defend his beleaguered class. Billionaires, he argued, should not exist in a cosmic sense," but in reality most of them are simply "people who do really good things and kind of help a lot of other people. And you get well compensated for that." He warned too about the dangers of ceding too much control over their wealth to the government, allegedly bound to stifle innovation and competition. Zuckerberg's reasoning isn't unique among the 1%. As common as this argument is, it also happens not to be true. Take the basis of Mark Zuckerberg's fortune. The internet was developed out of a small Pentagon network intended to allow the military to exchange information during the Cold War. And of the top 88 innovations rated by R & D Magazine as the most important between 1971 and 2006, economists Fred Block and Matthew Keller have found that 77 were the beneficiaries of substantial federal research funding, particularly in early stage development. This isn't all to say that the private sector hasn't played a significant role in driving innovation. But the the fortunes built off of each couldn't exist were it not for the government more often than not taking the first step, funding innovation far riskier than venture capitalists and angel investors can usually stomach.