Imagining the wealthy as some sort of unified force for evil represents the kind of lazy intellectual collectivism into which the left falls far too easily.

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It seems you can’t go anywhere these days without hearing the refrain: America is suffering … and it’s because of the wealthy. Barack Obama rails against fat-cat bankers and employers sitting on money. Liberal protestors bewail the influence of money in politics in the wake of the Supreme Court’s campaign finance rulings.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid takes to the floor for daily denunciations of Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who’ve financed many conservative and libertarian causes.

Of course, there are some ironies at work here. Neither Obama nor Reid are exactly poor men.

Those protesting the influence of the moneyed elite go conspicuously quiet at the mention of liberal billionaires like George Soros or Silicon Valley hedge fund mogul Tom Steyer. Still, we should show the arguments the respect of considering them on the merits rather than dismissing them based on their advocates’ stations in life. So are the rich really to blame for America’s problems?

Start with the basics. Any notion of a free market system as exploitive runs into an immediate difficulty: Exchanges do not occur in truly free markets unless they’re mutually beneficial. When was the last time you bought something you didn’t want? Not something you didn’t need, not something you later regretted buying — something you didn’t want?

We only make exchanges — whether giving up our money for goods or services, or giving up our labor and free time for wages — if we value what we’re getting more than what we’re giving. The same is true of the people we’re bargaining with. Thus, both sides are inevitably better off than they would have been otherwise. There are, of course, exceptions in cases of force or fraud, but those are deviations from the free-market system, not representations of it. Free markets work to make everyone better, not to enrich one cohort at the expense of another.

What about President Obama’s claims that businesses are hoarding their cash rather than using it to help out less privileged Americans?

The president — his lack of conversance with the business world showing through — errs in the first place by thinking that businesses are driven more by charitable (or alternately, miserly) impulses than by economics. But the economy doesn’t rely on corporate good will for its supply of jobs — it relies on opportunities for profit.

As Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." That’s the genius of capitalism — it doesn’t require good intentions to generate good outcomes.

Corporations aren’t “sitting on money” so that they can watch the labor force twist in the wind. They’re doing so because the Obama Administration’s maelstrom of interventions in the economy have left them unsure of what the return on their investment will be — or whether there will be one at all.

Consider just one example: The employer mandate under ObamaCare, requiring firms with more than 50 employees to provide health insurance, would increase the cost of each employee by thousands of dollars. Yet former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs recently said that he doesn’t expect the mandate will ever go into effect. Would you hire new employees with so much uncertainty surrounding such significant costs?

Finally, let’s turn to the allegations by Senator Reid and his ilk that big campaign donors — for which the Koch Brothers (only the 59th largest donors in recent political history) have inexplicably become the poster boys — are converting American politics into an oligarchy.

The error in this line of thinking is conceiving of the rich as a uniform group. The real danger in politics comes from organized factions of common, narrow interests. Think of agricultural firms pursuing farm subsidies, labor unions reaching into the public purse, or green tech companies seeking alternative energy subsidies.

“The rich,” however are not a uniform class. Yes, the Koch Brothers are billionaires, but so is George Soros — and they agree on virtually nothing. Moreover, the Koch’s group Americans for Prosperity spent $122 million during the 2012 election. What did they get in return? A reelected President Obama and a U.S. Senate still controlled by the Democratic Party.

No matter how much money they have, the Kochs still have just one vote apiece, just like every other American. Money can give you a bigger soapbox. It can’t however, convince people to listen. 

This country is not being victimized by the wealthy. There are good rich people and bad rich people, just as there are in the middle and lower classes, respectively. Imagining the wealthy as some sort of unified force for evil represents the kind of lazy intellectual collectivism into which the left falls far too easily.

It’s worth remembering that during the last Democratic administration — the tenure of Bill Clinton — there was also plenty of conspicuous wealth around. There were good times being had on Wall Street and fortunes being made in Silicon Valley. Yet we weren’t demonizing the upper class nearly as much in the 1990s. Why? Because Americans further down the socioeconomic ladder were also tasting the benefits of growth. A lack of want is the best recipe for a lack of envy.

That’s the reason the Obama Administration and liberals have promoted animus towards the wealthy as often as possible: because if Americans stopped focusing on the rich, they might start actually focusing on the government that’s preventing them from joining their ranks.