I don't talk about wealth divide. I talk about concentration.
The genesis remains the same.
If you make something and I make nothing, where does the wealth begin to concentrate?
Is it a 'flaw' in capitalism, or just reality observed?
Is the 'problem' that you made something, or is the 'problem' that I made nothing?
If you make boiled peanuts to sell on the roadside and someone else organizes thousands of people to design, build and operate re-useable space rockets, guess which one is more valuable to society, and where the wealth will concentrate.
Extreme concentration of wealth is always, and I mean always, a problem.
Only if you view the pie of wealth as fixed, wherein my accumulation of wealth necessarily means your loss.
Most of what I think you would identify as extreme wealth is just ownership of massive capital equipment supplying the needs of millions of people. It didn't exist before, it wasn't taken from someone else.
Seriously, just consider the laws of nature. Our current economic system is in direct conflict with basic laws of nature. Finite resources, ecosystem diversity & interdependence, to name the two I generally reference.
The finite resources that compose your phone have, if separated into their constituent elements and piled on your desk, what value? You'd probably pay someone to take away the mess!
But apply accrued human knowledge and creativity to those few ounces of elements and you can have something worth over a thousand dollars to some people.
Are we limited by the finite world, or actually only limited by what understanding we gain and apply to the finite world?
If you thought that wealth was fixed by finite reality, and not by the application of understanding and effort, I get how you'd think one person with a lot of wealth has it necessarily at the expense of anyone with less. But that isn't how wealth actually works.
Maybe because I'm spiritual but not religions I can easily, and without emotion, look at anything critically. I worship nothing and nobody.
Me too.
Ain't we special?
Those of you who get super bent out of shape when capitalism is discussed like this, well I find you to be really, really weird. But, then, I have to remember what you're likely being fed. There are a lot of people out there feeding your algorithms with ideas that support a worship mentality. When criticisms of capitalism knee-jerk fears of socialism or communism, well that's drawing on the same anti-pragmatic crap that the god/devil duality, leading to weird either/or arguments like you tend to make.
My fear of communism started after seeing the Berlin Wall and the crosses.
I guess you could say Khrushchev fed me that. So if you want to blame someone, blame him.
I wanted to understand how the German people, world renowned as brilliant and industrious, could thrive under one set of conditions and so visibly struggle under another.
At its root, the differences were between societies constructed on compulsion vs. freedom - bureaucratic diktat vs personal choice.
That's why I'm always wary of the people offering bureaucracy and diktats as the 'solution' to the problems they perceive.