Margaret Thatcher was a British Prime Minister and she was called the Iron Lady by friends and enemies.

When people argue against income inequality, they would rather have the poor be poorer, provided that the rich where less rich.

It doesn’t bother me that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are billionaires. I think that policies designed to punish the rich, only punish all of us.

The question is: how does someone gets rich?

In our world, we have two main economic systems. Communism and capitalism.

In communist societies like in Russia, Venezuela, China, Cuba, and North Korea, the government owns all the means of production and hardly any wealth is created. The focus of the government is not about creating wealth for its citizens, but about keeping control.

After WWII there was a great income inequality between East and West Germany. One was capitalist and one was not.

After the Koran war, a great income inequality has emerged between North and South Korea. One was a capitalist and the other one not.

After the Cuban revolution, many Cubans regularly risk their lives in order to get out communist Cuba and go to Capitalist United States.

After the Government Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela, there has been a massive migration of Venezuelans to Colombian and other neighboring countries to scape communism.

In a capitalist society, you get rich by producing a product or service that other people want to buy.

For example, Elon Musk produces eclectic cars, sends rockets to space, implants chips in people’s brains to give them mobility and body autonomy.

People are happy to pay for those product and thus he has become a billionaire.

When J.K. Rowling offers her 7 Harry Potter books for less than $40, people are happy to pay for those 60 hours of reading time. She becomes rich without forcing anyone to buy her books.

According to Nobel price winner economist William Nordhaus, the rich only capture¹ 2% of the value they create. The other 98% goes to the consumer, the rest of us, who lay on the couch and watch Netflix or listen to Spotify (another rich person creation).

The goods that the rich have created, enrich our lives and they continue going down in price and become more accessible to more people. The things that were luxury goods just a few years ago, are now items that most of us can afford.

People below the poverty line have amenities such as refrigerators, Air conditioning, washing machines, dishwashers, and of course, cell phones and computers.

In conclusion, instead of focusing solely on diminishing the wealth of the rich, efforts should be directed towards fostering an environment where entrepreneurship and innovation can thrive, ultimately benefiting society as a whole.

1. In his 2004 paper “Schumpeterian Profits in the American Economy: Theory and Measurement,” Nordhaus reported this startling finding about the non-farm sector of the modern U.S. economy: “Only a minuscule fraction of the social returns from technological advances over the 1948-2001 period was captured by producers, indicating that most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers.”
   Specifically, producers, on average, capture a mere 2.2 percent of the total benefits of their successful introduction into markets of technological advances. A whopping 97.8 percent of those benefits are enjoyed by people each of whom as a consumer did nothing other than exercise his right to spend his money on those options that he judges best for himself. ↩︎

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