Millionaires and billionaires acquire wealth by producing products and services that other people want to buy, from computers to Greek yogurt to bad books like Our Revolution. Sure, some millionaires and billionaires are born into wealth, but even they haven’t subtracted from the net worth of any other American. In fact, the rich tend to improve the lives of other Americans by 1) providing them with jobs, and 2) buying the products they manufacture, and 3) paying high taxes, and 4) contributing generously to charities (well, most rich people anyway, not presidential contenders).

As for Sanders’s notion that we have witnessed a “transfer of wealth from working families to the top one-tenth of 1 percent” — this is gibberish. How did that transfer happen? Were working families taxed heavily and the tippy-top one percenters excused? In that case, though it would be wrong to call it a transfer of wealth (the money wasn’t being deposited in Bill Gates’s account), it would amount to the rich being free riders when it comes to enjoying the goods of government including national defense, roads, food inspection, and so forth.