The first thing you have to do before you can convince some people that others should live in poverty, is convert them all to a religion that considers poverty to be a virtue.
Modern Christianity is about selling the "belief" that the poor are more dishonest than the rich, and that with the accumulation of wealth comes an equal share of benevolence, that can only be spread to the many who are called, because it was imparted by the "invisible hand" of economics on the chosen few.
In this sense, human progress has largely been defined by economists as a "decrease in poverty," however relative such an idea may be. But to me it is defined by how much humanity has overcome its collective worship of various fears and fictions. And much of human history has been a contest, almost like an angry dance, between these two opposing ideas.
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