My mother said, if you gave every poor person a million dollars most of them would be in the same position or worse within a few years. Studies of lottery winners bear out her view. She said poverty is a state of mind. Poor people buy beer and cigarettes. Poverty is more a state of mind and a view of the world than an economic state.
I’ve known some wealthy people. Some of them are, as you say, not nice people. But one woman who has thirty rentals will work with people down on their luck so long as they’re honest with her and willing to work. She just got paid back over $3,000 by a family who worked it off with her in labor until the husband got a real job. But if they’re lying or doing or dealing drugs, she throws them out.
Not all rich people are bad people just as not all poor people are good. Poor people, however, do not hire employees and rich people do.
It has also been said that if you took all the money in the country and divided it equally among all of the people, in 2 years that money would be back in the hands of the original owners.
The world is filled with people who can't manage money. They make emotional spending decisions, seek immediate gratification and have no personal economic discipline. The socialists can redistribute wealth, but that won't have any meaningful long term effect.
But then, results don't really matter to progressives as long as their voters get their bling.
I’m not really referring to the feckless poor. The kinds of riff-raff who win the lottery and end up blowing it on drugs and partying because they are utterly financially incontinent with what they have. However, many people who budget hard and work hard who are struggling with earning enough to pay rent, food medical bills etc on minimum wage shouldn’t be having to struggle so hard on poor wages. I too know wealthy people, in fact there are people on the other side of my cousins’ family who are millionaires through their own effort and intelligence, and they are sound people, but then a million isn’t mega-wealth, its comfortable and prosperous, but not obscene. Who needs a billion dollars though? And if you are a billionaire, and not all of their workers are being paid a decent living wage and have full health insurance, there is something basically wrong with their values and ethics, because you can quite obviously afford to treat the people who work for you with a lot more respect and decency. I’m hardly a communist, but everyone needs to play their part to make a country a good place to live for all, and that includes its industrialists, entrepreneurs and bankers as well as those lower down the pecking order. IMHO its just as wrong to want to shape a country’s policies so that it is a mere playground for the wealthy and everyone else is merely one fo their servants, as it is to reduce people to become slaves of the state. Any decent country needs a large middle class and many small, independent business owners at its backbone, not one where you have a few ultra-rich billionaires and most other people are wage-slaves who can’t earn enough to pay for their families to be fed, clothed housed and have proper medical care as well as pay for a decent amount of luxuries to make life a pleasure as instead of a constant struggle for survival. Jefferson was a great proponent of the idea of a nation full of free prosperous yeomen, even if he himself was a large plantation owner.