Michael Parenti: 'Wealth Creates Poverty'

Source:Make It Emphatic- Michael Parenti talking about wealth and poverty.

"From a Michael Parenti Talk. Affluence Creates Poverty - Marshall McLuhan" 

From Make It Emphatic 

So in other words; for someone to have wealth and achieve some form of economic independence in society, someone else has to be poor. It's the old zero-sum game theory: for me to do well, you have to do poorly, because apparently the pot (or wealth) is not big enough for everyone to succeed. 

"In game theory and economic theory, a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant's gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participants. If the total gains of the participants are added up and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero. Thus, cutting a cake, where taking a larger piece reduces the amount of cake available for others as much as it increases the amount available for that taker, is a zero-sum game if all participants value each unit of cake equally.

In contrast, non-zero-sum describes a situation in which the interacting parties' aggregate gains and losses can be less than or more than zero. A zero-sum game is also called a strictly competitive game while non-zero-sum games can be either competitive or non-competitive. Zero-sum games are most often solved with the minimax theorem which is closely related to linear programming duality,[1] or with Nash equilibrium." 

From Wikipedia

Michael Parenti's zero-sum game theory, is traditional socialist thinking, that if you allow for people to do well, that's exactly what they will do, while others won't do as well. Which is called the marketplace. And then they blame the economically successful and advantaged, for having people in society that haven't done well. And completely throw personal responsibility out the window.