Hoarders

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18. Absolutely not.

The original dream was to become rich so that you could then have the freedom to contribute to the community. For our founding fathers living in an Age of Reason and discovery the highest dream was to get enough wealth so that you could then devote your life to study and in most cases die penniless like Jefferson and others.

Benjamin Franklin, for example became the most famous person on the planet when he discovered electricity and invented the Lightning Rod. He purposely refused a patent so that it could be made cheaply and distributed quickly to reduce fires in growing communities with lots of wooden structures closer and closer together.

Take Teddy Roosevelt's father, for example. During the Civil War he was one of the richest men in America as he was the 5th largest landowner on Manhatten. He observed living conditions at the Army camps and realized that men were drinking up their wages within a few days of payday and families were starving back home. He invented an allotment system (that is still used by the military today) that allowed pay to be split so that soldiers could take a few dollars in the field and send the bulk of it directly back to the family back home. He then spent the rest of the war going to the camps and signing up soldiers to the plan. Given that morale in the Army was plummeting as more and more soldiers were getting letters from home about the desperate conditions that there families were in, Roosevelt's actions had a dramatic impact on morale and might have actually saved the Union Army.

Of course Teddy's father made one other great contribution, forging a spirit of reform and service in Teddy Roosevelt who, among other things, brought us a progressive income tax.

The idea that the American Dream was for acquiring huge amounts of largesse for personal gain is a very recent change in how the elites perceived themselves here.