One of the stories missing from all this income/wealth “inequality” talk is that most wealth is built up in the practice of business ownership. Business ownership comes in the form of the sole proprietorship, LLC, partnership or corporation and their sundry forms.
The stock market allows the average American to be an owner, but the US and state governments make stock ownership expensive and as regards the Social Security retirement fund wholly illegal.
So you can own your own business, but again government makes that very hard. It takes about 32 days to open a business in Chicago and time is money. Toss in local, county and state zoning, permitting and licensing regulation and for most people it’s better and easier to just get on welfare.
So people with little to no assets have a choice. Either they can continue along the incentive path government has created which leads to permanent welfare dependency or they can own a business which government has made nearly impossible for them to do. Some choice.
What on earth are you talking about?
It takes absolutely nothing to open a brokerage account and it's dirt cheap to buy stocks. Qualified dividends and long term capital gains for a large portion of the population is taxed, for federal tax purposes, at 0%. I had more than $100K in long term capital gains last year, and I'm not paying more than 15% to the federal government on those gains!
Expensive??? Building wealth by owning stock in the U.S. is a lot easier than running a business and, from my experience, a lot less risky. Hundreds of thousands of small business owners go out of business every year. For a lot of them, it's because they have unrealistic ideas about what it takes to run a business. They don't do their due diligence. They open the 4th pizza parlor in a city of 5,000 and then wonder why they can't make it. It's easy to blame on government regulations. More often, it's unrealistic expectations!
My husband and I have been buying stock in U.S. businesses for more than 30 years, both in taxable accounts and in retirement accounts. We've only been wage earners, but we used our earnings to buy stocks and we are now well situated for retirement. No, you do NOT have to own a business to build wealth. You do, though, have to invest in something. If it's your own business, fine. But if you are buying stock in American businesses, you too can build considerable wealth!