Money for Rich and Poor
We need only look around us to see that people experience a wide variety of financial circumstances, from crushing poverty to extravagant wealth. Even if the most abject and squalid poverty could be eliminated and everyone were able to enjoy the basics of life, there would still be economic differences between people.
Unfortunately, the gap between rich and poor often becomes a source of social conflict. Although many poor people are content with their lot, many others envy those in more comfortable circumstances and feel resentful of every privation. Conversely, while many rich people generously endow foundations and other efforts to improve the lot of the less fortunate, all too many have intense negative attitudes toward poor people, either fearing outright class warfare or more commonly, resenting any improvement in the material situation of other classes as an unacceptable attempt to ape their betters and claim privileges to which they have no right.
Furthermore, it is not just individuals who experience these negative attitudes toward those in other financial circumstances. Whole communities can become entrenched in them, self-reinforcing those attitudes. When everybody around you talks about how "whitey" is keeping you down, or how "colored people" all want to sit around and do nothing but smoke dope and have kids for the welfare payments, it's really hard to avoid falling into the same pattern of thinking. Much as we'd like to think that we set our moral compasses by some Platonic ideal of Right, the truth is that we take our cues from those around us, and bucking the crowd in favor of objective evidence to the contrary is very difficult.
In the international arena we also see envy and resentment between rich and poor nations. Although even the most wealthy of nations have pockets of poverty, some nations seem mired in a morass of poverty from which they are unable to escape. Often this is the result of bad leadership and poor economic policies, but it has recently become popular among certain liberal thinkers at universities in the wealthier countries to encourage the view that the poverty of poor countries is the result of robbery on the part of the wealthier countries. According to this system of thought, often referred to as transnational progressivism, the world is divided up into "oppressor" and "victim" groups, and all inequality in the world is the result of the oppressors wrongfully taking from the victims. Any form of advantage is redefined as wrongful privilege, and persons identified as being members of oppressor groups are hectored about their moral debt to the victims who don't enjoy these privileges.
As a result, we see more and more focus on supposed remedies that treat poor nations as units rather than communities of individuals, rather than programs that focus on bettering the lot of individuals who can subsequently help lift others out of poverty. For example, we see grandiose public works projects from which millions are often skimmed by corrupt kleptocrats on the top, and for which the actual poor people have little use, but woefully little in the way of micro-loans that enable ordinary joes and janes to start their own businesses that would hire their neighbors and provide numerous people with gainful employment and honest incomes in an ever-expanding circle.
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