When a dubious economic theory turns up as the punch line in a wildly popular song, its safe to say that the proposition has deeply penetrated the publics consciousness.

The odd notion that when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer received recognition and publicity in the jaunty foxtrot Aint We Got Fun, introduced as part of the vaudeville revue Satires of 1920 and then a huge worldwide hit in recordings and performance after that.

The lyrics, co-written by Tin Pan Alley legend Gus Kahn, describe a young couple facing hard times

Not much money
Oh but honey
Aint we got fun!
The rents unpaid dear
We havent a bus
But smiles were made dear
For people like us
In the winter
In the summer
Dont we have fun?
Times are bum
And getting bummer
Still we have fun
Theres nothing surer
The rich get rich
And the poor get.... children.

The idea that the rich get rich (or richer) as the poor get poorer had already established itself a century ago as such a cherished clich that the songwriters knew the audience would reach for the familiar word to rhyme with surer, and they deliver a laugh by mentioning children instead. The lyrics go on to describe the arrival of twins for the merry, love-struck couple (twins and cares dear/come in pairs dear) and then flaunt the poorer expectations with a darker edge.

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Landlords mad and getting madder

Aint we got fun

Times are bad and getting badder

Still we have fun

Theres nothing surer

The rich get rich

And the poor get laid off.

This little song drew portentous comment from some of the most significant writers of the twentieth century. George Orwell (in The Road to Wigan Pier) saw it as poignant expression of working class anxiety during the painful recession that followed World War I. Citing the bittersweet lyrics he noted that all through the war and for a little time afterwards there had been high wages and abundant employment; things were now returning to something worse than normal, and naturally the working class resisted. The men who had fought had been lured into the army by gaudy promises, and they were coming home to a world where there were no jobs and not even any houses.There was a turbulent feeling in the air.

THE RICH AND THE REST OF US

While novelists ruminated on the vast chasm between the rich and the rest of us, activists and radicals dedicated their lives to closing that gap by shattering the power of the exploiter class. In 1909, the IWW (International Workers of the World) proudly published the first edition of The Little Red Songbook, with ballads and anthems meant to rally laborers everywhere into One Big Union and to smash capitalism once and for all. The preamble to this collection baldly declared: The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system. The most famous hymn in the anthology, Ralph Chaplins Solidarity Forever, borrowed the melody of The Battle Hymn of the Republic to convey its message that the rich built their wealth at the expense of the downtrodden poor:

Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite

Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?

Is there anything left to us but organize and fight?

For the union makes us strong.

It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;

Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid

Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made

But the union makes us strong.

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn

But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn

We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn

That the union makes us strong.

A century later, long after the disintegration of the IWW (The Wobblies), even after the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the near universal rejection of Marxist ideas of class struggle, political demagogues and prophets of pop culture continue to peddle the outrageous notion that the creation of wealth by one citizen inevitably leads to the impoverishment of his neighbors.

The hugely influential 1987 film Wall Street (the same melodrama that gave the world the indelible phrase greed is good) provided memorable expression to the notion that wealthy operators could only enrich themselves by denying benefits to others. Bud Fox, the aspiring trader played by Charlie Sheen asks his mentor Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) How much is enough? and the charismatic villain emblematically replies: Its not a question of enough, pal. Its a zero sum game, somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isnt lost or made, its simply transferred from one perception to another. Later, in one of his windy speeches (as scripted by Oliver Stone) Gekko helpfully explains the basis for economic inequality in America. The richest one percent of this country owns half our nations wealth, five trillion dollars, he declares. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. Its bullst. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of that hat while everybody else sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now youre not nave enough to think were living in a democracy, are you buddy? Its the free market.

Inevitably, this old sense of a rigged game-- of the arrogant, avaricious few abusing and oppressing the hard-working many plays a role in our politics and public debates. In his campaign for the presidency in 2000, Vice President Al Gore (the preppy, Harvard-trained son of an influential U.S. Senator), framed his struggle as a battle between the people and the powerful. In the next two election cycles (both 2004 and 2008), North Carolina Senator John Edwards campaigned for the presidency in a preposterously populist pose. Before the unwelcome attention on his private life, he became famous for an endlessly repeated stump speech that described the nation as painfully and utterly divided. Today, under George W. Bush, there are two Americans, not one, the blow-dried blowhard, multi-millionaire trial lawyer, solemnly intoned. One America that does the work, another America that reaps the reward. One America that pays the taxes, another America that gets the tax breaks. One America that will do anything to leave its children a better life, another America that never has to do a thing because its children are already set for life. One America that is struggling to get by, another America that can buy anything it wants, even a Congress and a President. (Des Moines, December 29, 2003). The two Americas theme unwittingly conformed to the message of the Little Red Songbook, with its emphasis on a working class and an employing class with nothing in common.

Senator Edwards' economic and social analysis deserved no more respect and credibility than his marital vows, but countless commentators and candidates promote a similar view of our current economic situation. Lou Dobbs, the carefully-coiffed Cassandra of CNN, offered an apocalyptic bestseller in 2006 called War on the Middle Class. In its pages, this Harvard-educated resident of a 300-acre horse farm in Sussex County, New Jersey, declares that ours is becoming increasingly a divided society a society of haves and have-nots, educated and uneducated, rich and poor. The rich have gotten richer while working people have gotten poorer What was for almost two hundred years a government of the people has become a government of corporations. In my opinion we are on the verge of not only losing our government of the people, for the people and by the people, but also standing idly by while the American Dream becomes a national nightmare for all of us.

The laughably ludicrous proposition that elites wielded less power and enjoyed fewer unearned privileges in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or that ordinary working people enjoyed more options and comforts two generations ago (in the depths of the Great Depression), demonstrate the toxic impact of the rich-get-richer/poor-get-poorer lie. The defense and promulgation of that lie requires outlandish claims about the levels of suffering and destitution in our peerlessly prosperous society. If the tremendous explosion of American wealth in recent years (slowed but not halted by todays downturn) somehow damaged the prospects and well-being of the nations poor, then poverty would be both more prevalent and more abject than in prior decades a proposition contradicted by all the evidence.

The claim that progress for the rich causes pain for the poor is logically impossible, historically unsupportable and culturally (and psychologically) unforgivable.

DOES WEALTH CAUSE POVERTY?

In his influential and eloquent 1981 bestseller Wealth and Poverty, George Gilder assailed the concept of material well-being as static and limited. This mode of thinking, prominent in foundation-funded reports, best selling economics texts, newspaper columns, and political platforms, is harmless enough on the surface, he wrote. But its deeper effect is to challenge the golden rule of capitalism, to pervert the relation between rich and poor, and to depict the system as a zero-sum game in which every gain for someone implies a loss for someone else, and wealth is seen once again to create poverty.

In addition to abundant records from past and present to disprove this cramped and pessimistic point of view, theres the simpler perspective of personal experience and common sense. In 1996, my wife and I moved with our three children to Seattle and, like most denizens of the great North-wet, we took immediate pride in the world famous plutocrats who became our new neighbors. For a time, much-publicized lists of the nations wealthiest individuals showed four out of the top ten living in the Seattle area (thanks to spectacular success in the software and cell phone businesses). In all the years weve raised our family in Western Washington, weve never once heard a local resident express resentment over the fact that some of the richest people on the planet choose to live in our region. People might criticize Bill Gates for his public pronouncements, or register their complaints about the products he and his team unleash from Microsoft, but none of these skeptics ever expresses the wish that the billionaire would pack up his family and move to LA or London. In fact, the tens of thousands of boaters who ply their craft on Lake Washington love to cruise past the sprawling Gates mansion on its bluff in Medina, and point out the site to all visitors as a regional landmark. Continued...