Those of us who espouse a more liberal approach tend to be against extreme concentrations of wealth, which concentrates power, which concentrates wealth…
Once you have a large amount of money, earning money is no longer about hard work or productivity; it’s about being a financial parasite, because whatever you “earn” comes out of the productive economy.
BTW, there are some good debates about what brought us out of the Great Depression (and good debates about what got us there, too!). Most of the people I’ve talked to — who actually lived through it — give credit to FDR and his New Deal programs. Most of his programs worked to funnel money back to working people/regular citizens, because the credit bubble of the 1920s also showed the disparity in wealth we see today. Coincidence??? I think not.
The war enabled many unemployed men (and women) to work for the military and removed them from the job-seeking pool in the U.S. At the same time, the build-up of the “war machine” (building tanks, bombs, planes, ships, subs, artillery, and all the goods and services needed to support the war) brought a lot of jobs on-line. It certainly helped, but it was not alone in lifting the U.S. out of the depression. The bottom of the business/credit cycle was reached, and things were cheap, and bad debt and waste were largely eliminated by that point. It’s only natural that things would go up from there.
