Nobody said that, but more importantly, just putting it that way implies you don’t understand what situations are out there. Because people who aren’t able to improve their situation usually aren’t laying around, they’re working very hard just to make ends meet. When we take issue with glib claims like that “anybody has the opportunity to get wealthy”, it’s because it more or less dismisses all those people right from the start.
I wonder, do you actually understand who we are pointing fingers at? Let me use symbiotic terms.
You have expressed some reasonable gratitude for the mutualist wealthy, whose investment provides valuable development, to the benefit of everyone involved. There could also be commensal rich, who are idle and don’t really change much. But there are also parasitic rich, who make their money at the expense of others.
In a few cases this is explicit, as with Bain capital looting established businesses, and I know you don’t defend those. But it can also come in the more subtle form of making profits by pushing externalities on to other people. And this is actually really common; one could argue it applies to pretty much all of the ultra-rich, but at the very least it clearly does to the bankers, the oil barons, and the arms dealers who sit at the very top.
Insisting not to “demonize the rich” is asking us to forget those externalities, but it’s absolutely right to blame the people that are creating them. Indeed, it’s important to do so, because it helps explain why mobility is falling and what we could actually do about it.
Minimum wages keep Lucky Ducky from improving his situation, too. The comic seems appropriate here.
