cedarford writes at #154, “Conservatism never seeks the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few.”
Wealth “concentration” is a Marxist straw man that equivocates between economic and political power to create unnatural conflict between rich and poor for the benefit of statist leaders and dictators.
Economic power is the power to produce and offer one’s output to others in free, un-coerced, voluntary trade to mutual advantage. Political power is the power of the governments’ guns held to your head. This distinction was discovered by Ayn Rand in her moral defense of capitalism.
The “concentration” of wealth per se is irrelevant. I would be far better off living in a totally free capitalist society where one trillionaire happened to own a majority of the wealth than in today’s mixed economy where an unstable mixture of freedom and controls throttles everyone.
Only in a society where individual rights are protected, is a Henry Ford or Bill Gates even possible. And without men like Ford and Gates, all the laborers in the world barely subsist – as in India or China for the centuries before elements of freedom and capitalism were injected.
