I've always been an advocate of the free market. And I'll tell you why.

When I was 9, my dad arranged a tour of East Berlin for his family. As part of the deal with the USSR when the 4 zones were partitioned, this was allowed for an Air Force officer. This was at the height of the Cold War.

The Wall is gone now, but it was something to behold in those days. There's the Wall, the kill zone, the tank traps, the dogs, the watchtowers, the barbed wire, and the machine guns. All on the east side.

We went through Checkpoint Charlie on a bus, and were searched by the East German guards entering and exiting. The guards ran a mirror under the bus. They were all carrying machine guns. You could sum up East Berlin in one word - grey.

There was a museum next to Checkpoint Charlie, which was about the Wall. It was loaded with pictures of east Germans being killed trying to escape to the west.

West Berlin built platforms next to the Wall, so you can stand on the platform and look over it and see what a freakin' abomination it was. I never heard of anyone using those platforms to "escape" to East Berlin.

In West Berlin, there was the Russian War Memorial. It was an island of East Berlin surrounded by the west. The memorial was surrounded by barbed wire. There were two guards on duty there, with machine guns, of course. We waved at them, and they grinned at us.

Then an officer came out and looked them up and down. Their faces turned to stone, looking straight ahead.

I asked my dad about it, he said the guards were a pair who didn't know each other, with strict orders to shoot the other if one attempted to get escape through the barbed wire.

It was pretty obvious to my 9 year old mind that people simply do not like living under communism.

I've read a lot of history books over the years. It's pretty clear that communes and communism and socialism do not work. They don't work when people do them freely, they don't work when people are forced into it.

And the more free market a country is, the more prosperous it is. The evidence is strong and everywhere.

America is the place for very few people to get wealthy relatively compared to the rest is more accurate.

I don't know how long this asymmetric upside down pyramid structure will hold. Monopoly on violence requires participants to believe in its continuity, any fracture in perception no matter how small, will create an increasingly chaotic redistribution effect.

Except capitalism is a zero sum game. The two people you talk about that are multimillionaires are lucky. For each person you know that has made it, there are thousands of people that are equally as hardworking/talented but are destined to slum away for the rest of their lives.

All human beings deserve to live a happy life. We live in a world where few have accumulated more capital than they could ever spend in their lives while others starve to death.

I don't think anyone with a good moral conscience can support America's brand of capitalism. We live in a world where few live, the rest survive.

Theft? I don't see any indication of widespread theft. The fact that you don't make as much as you wish you were making doesn't make you a victim of theft.

> Money boils down to a finite resource

Musk more amply demonstrated how wealth is created.

The reason there is cynicism around philanthropy by America's elite class is perhaps the obliviousness to the methods and means it is created and supported.

"Here is a few billion dollar to a non profit company I control but you better not write that in the article" or "I didn't care for social consequences, I was just another player, it was ultimately for you" vibes

it just doesn't have the impact it used to, ironically because then inflation was low and integrity/morality was rewarded as society.

I think Ray Dalio has done a fantastic job of mapping out the trajectory we are on. We've already started seen glimpse of it and I don't think its going to cool down. America and the West in general has growing fatigue with various elements and perhaps the biggest one is that of wealth gap disparity.

Perhaps a snapshot of where we are: The richer you get the more you need access and proximity to those that monopolized violence and pay protection money too. It's not unlike Italy in the 1800s, you need money to purchase and distribute violence to acquire more resources and eventually the gap gets too big, people can't afford bread, and they get bold.