Complaints about "wealth inequality" are common and even popular, but are they based on facts? I think there are some false premises in current public discussion of wealth.
First false premise: The very wealthy take wealth away from others. This assumption goes uncontested in all the news outlets I've seen, yet it's completely false except in cases of theft or despotism. Take any very wealthy person (who is not one of the exceptions) and examine how they accumulated their wealth, and you'll see that they earned it, were very lucky, inherited a portion of it, or some combination of these. Wealth is not a finite quantity. If Bill Gates did not exist, for example, the wealth he created would simply not exist. He didn't take it away from anyone.
Second false premise: The wealth "gap." Wealth is a spectrum, with people at every income level from the lowest to the highest. There is no gap in the spectrum. Comparing two extreme or random points of any data spectrum is a relatively meaningless exercise. For example, the highest recorded temperature on earth is about 70 degrees F higher than the annual average temperature in Duluth, Iowa. So what? What matters is the spectrum and its shape.
Third false premise: Use of the phrase "wealth inequality." Attempts at wealth "equality" have always been associated with despotism and oppression. There has never been any such thing as "wealth equality," nor is it achievable where anything that can be called "wealth" exists because individuals' capabilities, opportunities, and desires are unequal. The phrase is, in the real world, meaningless.
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