“…the more power the government has to pick winners and losers, the more power rich people will have relative to poor people.”
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2014/01/21/the-biggest-impediment-for-the-poor-is-government-not-inequality/
This article is also well written and includes some good facts , and I agree with its conclusions, always a plus.
This question is key
...…is it a bad thing for a country to have some really rich people? Again, it depends on how they got rich.....
This is very key, Cuba has very few very wealthy , and a generally low standard of living, China started at a similar point thirty years ago when Mao Died , very few wealthy and a generally low standard of living.
Now Cuba is just as bad off as it was thirty years ago , but China has thousands of millionaires and hundreds of millions of car owners, the Chinese standard of living has dramatically improved at the same time as they
LOST a severe case of economic equality.
Could China have done even better?
Perhaps , if they had of had less cronyism and less corruption they could have even more millionaires and generally improved standards of living.
The experiment is ongoing, Cuba is about to loose the embargo that was an impediment to its growth , but it seems destined to keep the economic equality that is much worse.
There is a misconception that there is an economic pie which when one person takes a large slice of leaves less for the rest, this is a pitifully simplified misperception.
The economy of the world is more like a pie factory, where the guys that have bigger trucks carry away more pie and distribute the more pie than the guys with smaller trucks, as long as the delivery trucks keep coming and buying pie the pie factory will make more pies , they will build additional ovens if they must , but they will not turn away an empty truck if they can get paid instead.
So there is already lots of pie, but the more people want to buy pie the more pie there will be.
