Recently I took an eleven-day trip from the mainland, U.S.A. to Hawai’i.  We flew three jets to get there, spent a night along the way, stayed in two lodgings on the island of O’ahu, and returned in a similar manner.  My wife and I traveled in company with another couple, who met us in Honolulu, arriving from a different starting location.  All of this set me to thinking.

With the Internet, unlimited mobile phone calls and texts, it was on the whole pretty easy to set up this somewhat complicated vacation.

Sixty years ago, such a trip would have seemed of much larger magnitude.  Relatively speaking, the price of air fare then was much higher.  Thirty years before that, aircraft could not reach the islands from the mainland easily; it was necessary to build large flying boats which could land and refuel.  Islands across the Pacific were dotted with luxury hotels for such as Pan American World Airways to provide flight service to those who could afford it.  Only the very wealthiest could do so.

The Royal Hawaiian Hotel, a pink hotel in the midst of the Waikiki waterfront, is dwarfed by the towering hotels and resorts around it.  Now operated by Sheraton Hotels, there are several other, much larger, Sheraton towers sitting right next to it.  The Royal Hawaiian was built the size that it is, in the time it was built, because the number of travelers who could afford the trip was fairly limited, compared to the number of tourists who arrive daily in Hawai’i these days.

Sure, 300 of us crowd onto an airplane, gripe about the small seats, and endure the “hardship” of the six-hour trip from the coast to the islands.  But well over a dozen such aircraft, loaded to capacity, arrive in Honolulu every day.  The means are available for most American families to travel to and to lodge in Hawai’i.  Yes, it is expensive, but it is within reach.

Two generations ago, that was not the case.  Four generations ago, a trip to Hawai’i was beyond almost all but the very few who lived in luxury.  I hear folks (particularly my brother in law) talk about the increasing concentration of wealth.  The ideas that not only do 10% of the people own 90% of the wealth in America, but that 1% at the top control 90% of that, and that 0.1% individually have a whopping share of that.  I may not have the numbers exact, but the idea stands.

And I don’t resist the notion.  But I think we are missing the point.  The facts are that, worldwide, more people enjoy more benefits of wealth than at any time in all of human history.  Yes, there are poor people — around the world there are people who can’t get enough to eat, or who cannot get adequate health care.  But today, on a world wide basis, we are largerly aware of this and more often than not, concerned and doing something about it.

Yes, there is more to be done.  But even in developing nations around the world, more people have longer life expectancy than ever before.  In many cases, “poor” is defined in terms of being able to access or possess goods that weren’t even invented four generations ago.  Even in developing nations around the world, a large percent of everyone has a general idea of what is happening all around the world.

Yes, there are poor in America.  Yes, we need to take actions to address poverty and give everyone fair opportunities.  But as we discuss all this, let’s keep in mind a few salient points.  While it may be true that the very, very wealthy are getting increasingly rich, it is also true that the poor have more today than ever before.

One way to reduce poverty is to raise the general level of all wealth so that even the least advantaged have a lot.  Of course, along the way the wealthiest will become ever richer by comparison.

Another way to proceed is to take wealth from the rich and give it to the poor.  This is called revolution.  Typically through human history, the long range result is that wealth eventually concentrates again in the hands of the few.  Possibly a different few, but what’s the point.

Finally, it can be done — the taking of wealth away from the rich and giving to the poor — in a way that is institutionalized, so that the transfers happen over and over again.  This prevents future wealth accumulations by the few.  But the evidence through history is very strong that this leads to an overall lack of wealth that is more-or-less evenly distributed.

Over the past three generations, most often the poorest in the free market economic system countries were a lot better off than the average wealth owners in the large socialist societies.  This has been true world wide, over several generations, so it doesn’t seem to be a fluke.

So why is it so enduringly popular, this idea of wealth re-distribution?  Why is it that intellectuals almost everywhere denigrate the principles of free market economics, when the evidence is pretty clear that that it works so very well?