The Gap Between the Rich and the Poor

     There always will be a gap between rich and poor, in this and every other society; capitalist, socialist, feudal or otherwise.  And yes, there are "poor" people in the United States but compared to poor people elsewhere they do pretty well on the whole, with their cars, refrigerators and central heat and air.  When the late Russian president Boris Yeltsin was visiting the United States he asked to be shown where the poor people lived and his hosts took him to what they considered a poor neighborhood in Harlem.  He looked around, saw cars, saw well-dressed people and asked "but where do the poor people live"?
     Wealth is not money.  It is things money buys.  Viewed that way, there is a lot less difference between the average American and Bill Gates or Warren Buffet than you may think.  Suppose that you have a net worth of one million dollars ($1,000,000) and that Gates and Buffet are each worth fifty billion dollars ($50,000,000,000).  That means that on paper they are each worth fifty thousand times what you are. but they cannot use fifty thousand as much as the average American even though they can buy a lot more if they want to.  Beyond a certain point, if they have common sense, they won't want to.
     The average person eats three meals a day.  So do Gates and Buffet who, if they eat much more than that will be too fat to function.  The average American can afford just about any food that they can, including the most exquisite cuisine; not as often but pretty much of the same quality.  The same is true with travel to exotic places.  They can go to Hawaii and come back to Seattle and Omaha every day.  I  can go there at least once a year and that is enough for my satisfaction.  When a nation is prosperous its people are. The impulse to steal a rich person's paper wealth through regulation and taxation is simply the product of class warfare fueled by jealousy, rage  and shattered self esteem.   
     There is a way that a society can be wealthy without producing anything. It can have vast natural resources which can be sold without processing.  But then the mass of the population will still be in poverty because the rulers will enjoy their riches and have no incentive to benefit anyone else.  Otherwise only free market capitalism encourages investment, invention and innovation, so that the nation's factories hum, its railroads streak down its tracks and its silver jets through the skies, its docks are loaded with exports, its hotels and restaurants hum with activity and its schools are filled with tomorrow's leaders, well trained and educated, its people  employed and its unemployment lines  nearly non-existent.  Trying to create wealth by extracting money from those who have worked for it and earned it is wasted effort, a gigantic fraud on gullible voters because it destroys the delicate mechanisms by which mass wealth is created and distributed.  "A rising tide lifts all boats". That is not "trickle down economics" as claimed by the left.  It is truth.  The attempt to redistribute wealth is immoral, but It is also counter-productive because if it is successful it drains capital out of society, produces nothing, and destroys the moral fiber of a nation.  We should, and do, provide for those who cannot help themselves.  We are a compassionate people but, as Franklin Roosevelt said "welfare is narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit".  Freedom is the answer.  Socialism and liberalism is a fraud.