Why does the additional wealth come into fruition by the toil of poor people? If I have a lot of money and invest it, I don't see how poor people are affected by my investment at all, unless the fact that the money is not being injected back into the economy has some kind of very negative effect on the poor.
* Returns on investment capital tend mathematically to ensure the rich get richer
* Disparities between wealthy and poor people create resentment and tension
* Resources enable the wealthy to opt out of communities, creating an adverse selection condition that starves those communities
* The role of the finance industry in this story tends to intersect directly with poorer communities in predatory ways (see: subprime housing loans)
* The finance industry is intricately connected to most of the other mechanisms families have for obtaining and reinvesting wealth, so it can be difficult to ethically insulate oneself from it
There are ways in which wealth also creates opportunities and benefits across all classes that to some extent mitigate:
* They're an engine for investment into technology, which has product lifecycles that move so quickly that less wealthy people rapidly get access to new technology
* They create classes of jobs (see: Park Slope nannies, or the tool & die people who work on Gulfstreams for another cartoonish example) that would not otherwise exist.
&c.
(FWIW: net-net, I think we need more redistribution, and that we tilted too sharply away from Reagan-era high taxes at exactly the point at which changes in productivity made that shift most harmful. I'm making what I hope are descriptive, and not positive, points).
Disparities between wealthy and poor people create resentment and tension
Do they really? One thing I find interesting is that a lot of people who are certainly rich are not really resented. For example, soccer players earn quite a lot (my compatriot Ronaldo earns about $80M/year) and I don't really see much resentment, while a lawyer might earn $300k/y and have people hate him/her.
While there are certainly those who simply resent the rich, I'm not sure the average person doesn't have a more nuanced view.
I can't speak to the part about wealth coming from the toiling of poor people, but I can say that I find the immense advantages derived from capital over labor to be unfair.
Basically, I can sit at my desk, and in one action, move some numbers from a cash account into an equity security. In doing so, in one day, I can increase my wealth by an amount that it would take a full-time minimum-wage worker a little over 2 weeks to earn. It's one data point, but it definitely challenges the notion of what's fair.
To extend this further, with technology, the inequities of capital over labor will only increase with time because of how technology scales and amplifies an individual laborer's output. The people who will be left behind will be people working in industries that cannot or will not scale.
Is the solution then to make sure that everyone is capable of joining the information/automation economy through education? Do we decide that a universal basic income is the best approach to take? I honestly don't know.
