I appreciate the direct response, Congressman
@RoKhanna. You've raised a real question, so let me answer it seriously.
You're partly right, and I'll grant it fully: the Founders who established a government to protect individual rights performed an achievement no inventor can match, because they built the precondition for every other achievement. Jefferson and the framers created the framework of liberty. Lincoln preserved it and extended its promise to those wrongly denied it. On that we agree. The statesman who secures freedom is a hero of the highest order.
But notice the distinction that matters. Those men are great precisely to the degree they protected liberty, not to the degree they exercised power. The Founders' greatness was in handing power back. Lincoln's was in ending a violation of rights, slavery, the gravest in our history.
That is why FDR doesn't belong with them. He did the opposite. He expanded the state at the expense of the freedom the Founders secured: seizing gold under threat of prison, attempting to pack the Court, building the apparatus that treats your earnings as the government's to allocate. He used power; he didn't restrain it.
And here is the deeper point. You frame it as Rockefeller and Musk versus the statesmen, as if they compete. They don't. The statesman's whole purpose is to protect the conditions, namely individual rights, in which the producer can create.
The Founders, along with Locke and Aristotle, built the house. Musk, Rockefeller, Bezos, and Vanderbilt are examples of what free men do inside it.
If you fully understood the principle of individual rights, you would be fighting against men and women like Warren, AOC, Sanders, and the rest of these collectivist statists in both parties, instead of advocating ideas that deprive individuals of the very rights you claim to honor.
The greatest builders were the architects and perfectors of our democracy. The leaders who shaped the laws of the nation created the conditions for liberty and our economic success.
Rockefeller or Musk do not rival a Lincoln, FDR or Washington.