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On the socialist/capitalist and wealthy/poor dichotomies, I gotta say, these are the wrong ones to look at. Or let's say, these are the same everywhere, whether it comes to access to wealth creation opportunities or paying income taxes. They're poor people taxes. In Germany, but I've been told this is similar in other places to, you can pay up to 42% of your income if it is above 50k EUR. And this is called the "rich tax." Yet if you have such an income as a private person and if you don't have the means to pay for a book keeper to optimize your taxes, it is a matter of fact that you're not rich. In fact, you're average if you're earning 47k EUR in Berlin. https://proofinprogress.com/posts/2022-08-23/on-eating-with-the-rich.html I once went to Cannes and the south of France with a friend and we saw all the high class shops where "rich people buy clothing" or so I thought, until I found out that a large part of the peninsula we lived on belonged to a Russian oligarch and this dramatically changed my perspective. You're not "rich" if you think buying expensive clothes is rich. If you think Gucci is a status symbol. If you're truly rich rich, Gucci isn't a status symbol. The fact that the state has a "rich tax" for people with an income of 50k, this is the same moralization that is also being used to justify wars in the eyes of the population. The secret interests are, of course, highly rational - what else could they be. And so the propaganda is promoted to keep you statically in place, class-wise. Meanwhile, those who have a lot of public money (oligarchs, some "politicians") and those who somehow managed to enrich themselves with private money (billionaires), they're buying islands and boats and they're flying helicopters. They're not paying the 42% income tax, and they're not bothered by regulation that bars them from wealth creation events. Their wealth gives them so much agency that these things are rationalized. If one state does give them what they want, they move on.