The mind of a child

[Kasreyn]

By today's definition of poor ... everyone who ever lived before 1900 was poor.

This is true, but the definitions keep being ratcheted up. Why? Standard of living is slowly improving. I think the point is, some people (not everyone, but perhaps a vocal minority) believe it could be improved faster. That is, they say the rich should be keeping less capital to themselves, and reinvesting more of it into improving life for everyone on this planet, not just themselves and their do-nothing offspring. But under our laws, that's the choice of every individual rich person, and I'm not so sure the anti-rich types would behave any more selflessly if THEY had the chance to buy 50 Ferraris. =P

...most rich people, in the processes of becoming rich, generated jobs for many people who left poverty behind and entered the middle class.

What about inherited wealth? If someone inherits 20 billion from oil tycoon daddy and uses it wastefully (as most inheritors seem to), how does it create jobs or help the economy?

On the topic of capitalism being zero-sum, I feel constrained to point out a flaw in my statement (one you didn't bring up). The flaw is research - companies that accumulate enough capital can spend it on R&D - either in-house or by grant - and possibly assist some really smart labcoated type in making some discovery which will add value to the system. The labcoat will get funding and salary, the corporation will gain control over the new value (ie., patent or other copy protection measures, which leads nicely into our other debate raging ;-)

An example of such a system was the USSR under communism

This was because they thought that anyone with the right political views (ie., some commissar or other) was capable of competently running any particular industry. Simply put, they were ignorant, arrogant pricks who looked at the engineers and thinkers of the nation and thought 'aww, that ain't so hard!' So you'd see some idiot political appointee telling a factory manager to take actions that would be obviously unprofitable or useless to anyone with any experience. Or he would simply set ridiculously, impossibly high quotas under one of the 5 Year Plans. Etcetera. The soviet system was so far removed from reality than in the cold, hard world of real work it just couldn't manage things properly. The end result was, the total value in the system decreased over time. The American system is very productive, but perhaps does not attain the overall standard of living it is capable of. This is probably the fault of both the rich and the poor.

-Kasreyn