So what does that mean we want to achieve by having money? Well, I want to be able to eat. Great. Jeff wants his plumbing fixed. Awesome, we can do that too. The farmer wants a new dog. If we didn't have money, we'd go on wanting these things until a unique solution appeared in which everyone gets what they want. With it, however, everyone can actually do something useful right here, right now, and have the value of that work stored until they need it.
What money does, then, is enable people to perform tasks and keep the system rolling and exchange the value they generate for what they want. This means money is a great tool for making sure every human gets fed, gets shelter, gets water etc. because whatever it is they do doesn't matter, as long as someone values it and pays them for their time, which they can then exchange for their needs. Because everyone has needs, it tends to mean that there will always be people producing stuff to meet the basic needs because if people stop the value of that work goes up and more people will want to do it. Again, super basic supply and demand.
Capitalism is a good system because it doesn't (ideally) require anyone to sit down and plan what 300 million people in the US will do today to make sure everyone has food, water, power, heat and all. Instead, the need for someone to do something solves itself because eventually it will become so needed someone will get very rich for doing it. Hence capitalism is generally efficient at making sure things get done.
Then issue of poverty is more complex than it first appears. There's a common attitude that poor people deserve it. Is that strictly true? What if they're simply less able than others. For example, I could never run 100m in less than 10 seconds. If society decided that pay should be based on how fast you can run 100m, I would be very poor indeed, with little I could do about it. It's often the case that the skills of the poor aren't in high demand or, in fact, many people possess them because they're so basic as to be considered no skills at all.
What this does not mean is that the work that the poor do isn't necessary. If they all suddenly stopped cleaning toilets, for example, pretty soon there'd be a big demand for toilet cleaners and the value of their work would go up. Part of the problem is that the poor can't afford to stop earning to drive the value of their labor up. However, if they did (and this is related to strike theory), while we'd get a resolution to the filthy toilet problem eventually, in the mean time we'd all suffer. They'd suffer from not having an income; we suffer from poo on the walls. A cessation of production is not a good thing, and so the answer to the question "do the poor deserve it" is very difficult, because if they stopped doing the labor they do the effects could be sever indeed.
This pattern is echoed throughout the pay scales. I could be a really good worker, but a terrible manager. Just because I'll never be paid as much as the man who manages ten people well (so that, in theory, they produce for example 130% of what they would without him) doesn't mean my work isn't good or valuable.
You should be seeing the picture here that the purpose of money is to be an agent that flows, changes hands, enables value transfer and keeps everyone in business. The big question that's never really discussed is whether or not companies are the best way to make sure this flow doesn't stop or slow down; when governments talk about the redistribution of wealth, they mean intervention because it's all got stuck somewhere.
This is what has happened in the United States and most other developed nations.
A generation of reduction in tax, lowering the power of the government to redistribute wealth, has allowed money to build up in the hands of a few thousand people. While individually they may have worked for it, earned it, and have the right to possess it, that only works as long as the amount of money remaining in the system is enough for flow to continue without jolts.
For example, the current stagnation of our economy is a cycle where consumers don't have the spare cash to spend, many businesses can't make money, wages don't go up, so the problem never gets better. What it needed is to inject the money held by the super wealthy in to the economy again to promote growth. This is what happened in the second world war, pulling the US out of depression, and continued through to the 1970s, at which point so many people were "wealthy" they began to want to keep hold of their money than allow the government to continue to cycle it.
This problem is supposedly solved by having banks. The wealthy put money in, the money is leant out to people with good ideas for businesses, and new employment and wealth is created. The trouble is, banks don't do that for free.
They operate on the system that whatever they lend you, you have to repay plus interest. This amount is naturally higher than inflation, otherwise the bank and person whose wealth it is wouldn't make any money, but this means your company has to generate enough revenue to support this repayment, as well as any growth your company plans to make.
Obviously, this is extremely difficult. Most companies fail to do so. Unless the companies that succeed do so in such a way that they more than make up for the jobs lost by the failures, then you will start to see the banks taking more money out of the system than they're putting in to it. This builds up until breaking point where there's so much debt that can't be repaid that we hit the 2008 crash.
What this means in turn is that whilst bank lending can temporarily enable growth, it is not a permanent solution to the liquidity problem. On the individual level, for example, if I take out a credit card because I have no money, I could immediately spend $500, boosting the economy, but then I would have to repay $500 + interest to the bank - I am, in effect, worse off than when I started.
The answer here is clear but distasteful. Soured by a fifty year war against socialism and communism, raised believing that greed and wealth are good and promote prosperity for all, the population of the developed world doesn't have the stomach to "steal" from the ultra rich, even if it ultimately saves them. Instead, they have cut redistribution programs because of this stigma and the need to reduced government spending as tax revenues have fallen. The governments of the West need to start redistributing wealth, or the problem will never go away.
I believe that there is a moral obligation to make sure that those on the lowest incomes (who work) are still earning enough to survive and be happy. It is not their fault if society doesn't view their work as very valuable (and that's even before discussing whether or not the way jobs are paid is an accurate reflection of their value). As such, I believe that the government provides huge moral benefit to its citizens by making sure the poor are taken care of...
And conversely, I view tax avoidance as an extremely serious issue. It is, fundamentally, hurting people for greed and a rejection of the ideals of society helping to make all its members better.
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