[rm_-rf_slash]

There will always be people who take great pleasure and submit extraordinary effort to accumulate massive wealth. These efforts cannot be ignored in the prosperous society we have today. We take refrigeration and electricity and indoor plumbing - unheard of for the Founding Fathers - for granted, and perceive those without it as living in extreme poverty.

It is only when the pursuit of individual prosperity comes at the expense and suffering of others that limitations - regulations, taxes - are warranted.

It is a good thing we have a system that incentivizes the creation of wealth. But when the wealthy pull up the ladder, they sow the seeds of their own destruction and suffering for themselves and many others.

One need only look at the history of Venice to see how greed and selfishness can turn a once-vibrant and upwardly-mobile society into a permanent has-been.

[gonvaled]

Poverty is a relative term: somebody without a shirt is poor because nearly everybody has a shirt, not because shirts are absolutely necessary.

Edit: not sure why I am being downvoted. Take the poorest man on Earth today; he is richer than most men alive 20 thousand years ago. I would argue that he would conquer any ancient society.

[Retra]

I don't think you understand how poor the poorest man on Earth today is, nor how ineffective that wealth would be for gaining influence in other cultures.

[gonvaled]

Maybe I got carried away. Maybe not the poorest, but a very poor man today has resources at his disposal (via modern societies, no matter how poor) vastly greater than the resources a very rich man could get millenia ago. He can be cured of various deseases, can move around with incredible vehicles, can talk with people very far away from him, has incredible amount of knowledge at his disposal, and already knows things (“the Earth is round“) which are very valuable (as in “we invested huge amounts of resources to get to know this“). His power is enormous.

Human nature is such that we feel poor because we only have a bike, while our neighbor has a Porsche, without realizing that a bike is an incredible thing.

[rm_-rf_slash]

For a remote Afghan, or even a rural Cambodian, life is pretty much the same as it has been for thousands of years. The wealth and means exist to feed and clothe and shelter all humans on earth, but those who actually have means at their disposal choose instead to spend the money on wars and opulence.

Plenty of Middle-class Americans deny that the earth is round, even with all the knowledge of the world at their fingertips.

Potentially, yes, the world is miraculous compared to the past. But for those who are not born into some of that gradual wealth creation (as most Westerners were), they are still very poor and very exploited. Or they are too remote to bother with and so life is hardly any different compared with 100 or 500 years ago.

[gonvaled]

We are talking about different things: you talk about somebody alive today, but basically living in the past. His peers are those in times past, so he is as rich or poor as they were.

I talk about your average “very poor guy“ in a modern society: he is just poor compared to his peers, but rich compared to a lot of people.

But no matter who we are talking about: my point all along is that being poor or rich is a relative measure. To say that a person is poor, you need to state “compared to“. Usually we implicitely compare to the “average contemporary citizen“

[dwaltrip]

What's your point? Not everyone "deserves" a shirt? Seems like an incomplete analysis.

[gonvaled]

That simple things that we take for granted in our day-to-day live are luxuries (or even impossibilities) in other contexts . Which I use to show that poverty is a relative them.

The analysis is surely incomplete.