Rich people get paid for being rich. Poor people get paid for working. These things are not the same. "But rich people don't get paid for being rich, they get

Rich people get paid for being rich. Poor people get paid for working. These things are not the same. "But rich people don't get paid for being rich, they get paid to take risks! To invest!" There are two definitions of investment running around. One definition has a moral component: you sacrifice consumption today in order to build factories or take risks, thereby enabling greater consumption tomorrow, improving the world and taking a cut of the improvement. That's fine. Great, even! There's a second definition that is amoral, though: anything that you put capital into that provides a return is an investment. This second definition is just fine with "create a problem, sell the cure" and indeed encourages a lot of it. If you look at economic sectors, the ones that are doing really well (health care, housing, education) seem to have this as a high level strategy. Underproduce doctors, price goes up. Fuck up the zoning, price goes up. Pump more debt, price goes up. Merge up the competitors, price goes up. This is deeply unfortunate. Capitalism gets most of its legitimacy from the idea of competition as a check on power, but it seems that most of the money is made by figuring out how not to compete. They teach the Prisoner's Dilemma on the very first day of business school with this very lesson in mind. Don't play the game, play the meta-game! Don't build a product, build a moat! This is highly problematic. When the economy expands by multiples but most people see their pie slice not only failing to keep pace in relative turns but failing to grow in absolute terms, that's a problem, a failed promise. What's the answer? The right will hop up and down shrieking "Stalin!" "Mao!" any time you talk about taxing assets, but no, 100 million people will not starve to death if capital gains income gets taxed as regular income, or if we meet in the middle with work hours so that people are allowed to raise their own kids again, or any of a dozen other progressive policies. They tried to coup the last Roosevelt and they'll try to coup the next one, but the prospertiy gospel's own failed promises will be its undoing. We've fixed this before and we'll fix it again.