Robert often hears and reads people make variants of the following points:

“It is a problem that in country X, so much wealth is owned by so few people.”

Similarly,

“The gap between the rich and the poor is widening, which is bad.”

He usually scratches his head, wondering why so many people think it is bad if a nation’s pie is not sliced evenly (which it never is).  He guesses that people that say these things really want to make a point that is different than the point they are making.  For example, that the poorest people in a country live too pitifully.  Or, that wealth is unfairly transferred from one-generation to the next.  Or that political power is too closely linked to wealth. Or that the rich obtained their wealth through corruption. But he gets frustrated by the shorthand.