Makers and Takers

A favorite conservative meme is the notion that society is divided into makers and takers, in which they always manage to identify the rich as the good guys. In reality, that's nearly upside down. The way to get rich, or to be rich, has always been to live by the fruits of somebody else's labors. This isn't quite true, since for some of the wealthy, the most crucial part of the labor was their own - authors and inventors, for example. Even for them, though, what they consume was made by somebody else.

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