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People become billionaires only by exploiting workers and preying on vulnerable and less privileged people, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argued this week.

"No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars," Ocasio-Cortez told the author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Billionaires make their money "off the backs" of undocumented immigrants, minorities, and single mothers, she said.

"You sat on a couch while thousands of people were paid modern-day slave wages," she added.

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argues that people become billionaires only by exploiting workers and preying on vulnerable and less privileged people.

"No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars," she told the author Ta-Nehisi Coates at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event this week. Ocasio-Cortez shared a NowThis clip of their discussion on Twitter.

Coates, adopting the role of the hypothetical billionaire, asked the lawmaker to elaborate.

"I'm Joe Billionaire," he said. "I made widgets. I sold those widgets. I made billions of dollars, you know, selling those widgets, making those widgets. Therefore, those billions of dollars are mine. Why am I the enemy of healthcare?"

"Well, you didn't make those widgets, did you?" Ocasio-Cortez replied. "Because you employed thousands of people and paid them less than a living wage to make those widgets for you.

"You didn't make those widgets. You sat on a couch while thousands of people were paid modern-day slave wages," she continued. Billionaires make their money "off the backs" of undocumented immigrants, minorities, and single mothers who are all "literally dying because they can't afford to live," she added.

Ocasio-Cortez said that capitalism inevitably creates billionaires while others starve, then called for a fairer, more advanced society, saying that we are "at the edges of an untenable system that is starting to crack."

Democratic presidential candidates including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have sounded the alarm on wealth inequality and unequal access to education, healthcare, and other critical services.

Some of America's largest companies, including Amazon, Walmart, and Disney, have been accused in recent years of exploiting workers and failing to pay them a living wage.

Even Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and one of the world's wealthiest people, recently bemoaned stark inequality and argued that "the rich should pay more."

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