The foundation of the modern protests against capitalism is
that it leads to a perceived inequality of wealth. The criticism is that wealth
is concentrated in a very few individuals. The conventional wisdom is that this
is unfair, and that the wealth of an economy should be distributed more evenly
across society. One term used recently in a Rolling Stone editorial is
"Horrific inequality." Critics demonize the inequality in such terms,
assuming as a matter of course that it's not fair and that the world would be
better if people who have more would just share.
Fallacy of the Zero Sum Game
The basis for this conception is the presumption that the
total wealth is a zero-sum game, that if someone else has a bigger slice of the
pie, then your slice must be correspondingly smaller. People who subscribe to
this understanding haven't looked beyond their toes in this age of vast
material wealth, this age of iPhones and jet aircraft, and asked themselves
where all this wealth was a hundred years ago. Wealth is produced by the
capitalist. Since the industrial revolution, durable production has far
exceeded nondurable consumption, allowing wealth to accumulate in quantities
never before seen in history. The question any critic of capitalist wealth
needs to answer is when a capitalist entrepreneur becomes wealthy by means of
his efficiency in production, who became poorer? At whose expense did the
entrepreneur gain his wealth?
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