How do you believe the rich "take" from the poor. Can you provide examples of that? What am I missing?

71% of federal income taxes are paid by the top 10% of income earners, corporations pay between 5-10% of the total taxes. Meanwhile, most of government spending either goes to the general defense of the nation or social programs that disproportionately benefit the poor and the elderly. So clearly at some level, the wealthy are funding the poor already.

The founders of Google are worth billions of dollars, but they never charged you a dime to use it and in fact provide it for free. So, how did they hurt people? Why should I be bothered that they earned a few dollars per person for a free service I use every day by simply allowing advertisers to rent space on their cite for a marginal cost that was cheaper than what those advertisers had been paying in the past?

Can people in your view become rich simply by providing people something they want for a good value and in some cases free without "hurting anyone"? How do you separate those who got rich fair and square from those who got rich abusing people?

When you say we were better regulated capitalism in the 50s and 60s, what does that mean? There is far more regulation today than now.

Are you are referring to the tax rates, where did you get the false impression that the wealthy paid more taxes in the 50s? Did that marginal tax rate nonsense fool you?

Check out this link... notice how as the marginal tax rates on the top 1% came down their share of the total income taxes paid in this country went up. If the wealthy paid the same share of taxes today that they paid in the 50s, the deficit would be far larger than it already it.

Turns out when you tax wealthy people at lower rates they actually pay more taxes... I know its counterintuitive, but it is true. Largely for the reasons I noted before, when marginal tax rates are lower, the wealthy invest in things that produce taxable income. When marginal rates are high, they don't. They don't have to move their money overseas; they can just buy land and sit on it or stocks.

Meanwhile, it is not very easy to stop money from flowing overseas. It is strange whenever I discuss the challenges of keeping money from moving overseas, people want to impose autocratic rule telling people what they can do and can't do with their money. Hmmm and that is how we preserve democracy?

This second link shows the real effective tax Federal income tax rate on the top 1% since 1915. to 2010. After adjusting for changes in state income taxes, the effective tax rate of the wealthy has remained largely the same since WW2. As I said, marginal rates don't determine how much the wealthy pay in taxes, but rather what they invest in.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Classical_Liberals/comments/arlgnx/aoc_is_wrong_marginal_rates_have_very_little/

How do you imagine the country would be better without the wealthy? Where would the wealth come from that we need to operate our society. Every road, bridge, airport, house, car, etc. requires capital to build and maintain. So, if we don't have the wealthy to fund these projects, we would have to force people to save so the nation could borrow from them to build infrastructure, factories, houses, etc.

Probably the hardest concept for most people to grasp is that societies need wealth to accumulate to grow.

If we passed a simple law, that required 10% of everyone's wages to go into a long-term retirement account that they could never touch before the age of 70, but they could pass it on to their children, who likewise could not touch the money till they were 70... collectively the rest of us would have so much wealth between us, we would not need the wealthy.

The more wealth a society has the better off its citizens live, but the hard part is getting people to save so the society has enough wealth to invest in the capital it needs to raise standards of living.

The problem with any wealth redistribution system is it isn't a wealth redistribution system. Instead, it becomes a wealth liquidation program. Unless the poor save and invest when redistribute wealth, it disappears as consumption and so pretty soon there is no wealth left to distribute and no capital and society's go bankrupt and become dirt poor.