What he was describing has been ridiculed as "trickle-down" but in fact it works. I wonder if JFK would even be a Democrat today had he lived.

If I owned a business, I'd have the opportunity to become wealthy. I'd also have an even greater opportunity to become bankrupt. If I succeed, there's a long line of greedy people waiting in the wings to take a big portion of my efforts for their own purposes. Few of them would be willing to help pay for my losses should I become bankrupt.

Suppose I owned a corner grocery store that served a neighborhood. It is illogical to believe that the business succeeds by making the neighborhood poorer. If I captured the wealth of the neighborhood, I'd be out of business because no one would be able to shop in my store anymore. Instead, I would have to work to provide a service to the neighborhood at a competitive price while no doubt employing quite a few people who live nearby. By creating the business, I'm creating jobs and wealth not just for myself but for others as well.

Bill Gates has enormous wealth. Show me how he hurt others by "actively, maliciously making them poorer." Sure, he's a hard competitor but he got rich by building a company that's more profitable than General Motors and only employees about 1/20th the people. Millions of others use his products in their jobs, often to do things that didn't exist 25 years ago. Without the efforts of people like Gates, it's unlikely I'd be a software engineer today because the computer industry would probably still be like it was in the 1970s - largely limited to big businesses and government. I graduated high school in 1975 without ever seeing a computer except on TV.

Socialism likes to put on airs about how morally superior it is to capitalism. However, their arguments have no clothes. Socialism is the systematic manifestation of greed enacted as government policy where a ruling elite gets to decide how much someone should be allowed to own and how much should be redistributed to others.