Frankly, Scarlett, you weren't just selfish, you were a damned racist, too

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. One can easily notice this carries over into a wider notion as well.

If the Southern life was pretty and sophisticated, it's because slavery afforded it.

The accumulation of wealth is based on unequal exchange, and the exploitation of others. After all, if all you got for doing some amount of work was an exchange commensurate with the amount of time and effort you put into it, we'd all end up being wealthy in direct proportion to the amount of time we spend working. Capitalism as a whole is based upon the notion that we can underpay labour and overcharge consumers to create 'profit' which then accumulates to those who put in the capital that underlies the enterprise.

So the sophisticated lifestyles of the rich and famous are based upon extracting greater wealth for them (or their ancestors, from whom they inherited) at the expense of others. We may have largely done away with outright slavery, but exploitation is alive and well in modern societies the world over, either through the exploitation of their own people, exploitation of outsiders, or, most often, both.