Wealth is a comparative thing, not an absolute. The Rockefeller’s and Biltmore’s of the early industrial era would be considered pikers today if their wealth wasn’t adjusted to inflation, and today’s middle class would be the upper crust of society if they could be transported back with their income and savings intact. Inflation is a tax on wealth as long as the have nots have the ability to use their larger numbers to drive fiscal policy and control their wages to adjust for it. Both offshoring of production and disrupting their ability to organize have crippled them and allowed capital to dominate their economy.
The larger the gap between the haves and have nots the more stable wealth is, which is the purpose of capitalism, as the economy is pegged to the amount of capital at work in society (supply side), not the hours of labor needed to produce and purchase products (demand side). To maintain the largest gap it is critical that the money is seen as a finite thing that is used to purchase an infinite supply of real resources and labor, which America has perfected quite well by simply denying the ability of the government to create any quantity of money it desires while simultaneously protecting wealth from taxation and paying a dividend for simply possessing money (Treasury bonds).
America has, for most of the last half-century, used all of its tools to disadvantage the working class well beyond the simple lack of wealth and its attending advantages. Federal deficit spending, the only net source of US dollars in the economy, has been mostly vilified with the full support of the have-not class which was easily convinced to conflate its own budgeting processes with that of the monopoly issuer of dollars. It isn’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for damn certain that just isn’t so.
Should the people ever realize exactly how their own economy works they would likely remove the advantage of Treasury bonds from the haves as the first order of changes. Second would be forcing Congress to use the power of the purse to mitigate any suffering in the economy once it realized that it is entirely a political choice having nothing to do with economics. No one really believes that Bezos or the family that owns WalMart deserves to make thousands of times the income of their workers, especially if those workers are threatened with abject poverty and even death in a false concept of meritocracy.
There is plenty of room in the economy to reward hard work and innovation without denying the most basic of living standards to so many of our fellows. With a sovereign fiat currency that is a no-cost commodity to Congress to fulfill its Constitutional mandate to coin the currency “for the common welfare” we can enjoy a much higher level of social capital in education, healthcare, and infrastructure without burdening the society with excess taxation in a needless quest to “pay for” any benefits that elevate the human condition, nor need to go, hat in hand, to the wealthy for handouts. It is much easier to simply make them irrelevant to the funding of the public purpose and using taxation as inflation control and to avoid extreme inequality that perverts our democratic process.
I’m sure the wealthy realize that they gain extreme advantage and support from the myth that they are “job creators” independent of the government, which is wrongly viewed as a “cost” to taxpayers and the economy. This is the only reason I can think of why they would go to such great effort and expense to perpetuate the myths and misconceptions surrounding the creation of money and the role of taxes and “borrowing” in the economy when the government has no operational need for either. Money is a product of law and government, not something that grows on rich people and their corporations.
