On Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., claimed on CBS News that Americans recognize that there is something "fundamentally immoral and wrong about a nation in which we have three people who own more wealth than the bottom half of the American people."

That statistic may sound terrible, but consider this: If you have no unsecured debt and a fiver in your back pocket, you already have considerably more wealth than the bottom 20 percent of American households combined, and you're nearly halfway to joining those three people at the top. So perhaps the statistic is not so impressive or depressing as he means for it to sound.

But beyond that, Sanders is simply wrong that there's something immoral about individuals becoming rich. They're not hurting anyone, especially if other, less affluent people also have opportunities to gain wealth. And that goes double if, as in this country, government policies exist to help those who struggle to meet their needs or cannot support themselves.

In America 2018, the booming economy is creating wealth and corollary opportunities for hundreds of millions of Americans. It is fueling market-driven investment and research that will develop the technologies, medicines and jobs of the future. But what's most interesting about our current economic success is that it all flows from policy choices that Sanders opposed. After all, the major drivers of our current growth rates are the corporate tax and regulatory reforms introduced by President Trump and the Republican Congress.

Of course, nothing is perfect. America requires major structural reforms to our education, healthcare, and entitlement systems, for example. Yet capitalism has done far more for the well-being of the majority than any socialist system in history. In recent decades, the free market system has brought one billion Chinese out of the poverty in which their older socialist system had left them.

Even as capitalism succeeds, socialism fails again and again and again. That matters, because while Sanders' policies would certainly shrink the wealth gap, they would also shrink the wealth pot in its entirety. Former British prime minister and builder of modern Britain, Margaret Thatcher, said it best when she noted that socialists are happy as long as the rich are punished. "So long as the gap is smaller," Thatcher once explained "[the socialists would] rather have the poor poorer. You do not create wealth and opportunity that way."

Thatcher's lesson explains why socialist policies; whether minimum wage laws or expansive government programs, do very little to serve long term social good. Sanders might talk a good game of righteous anger, but he is no servant of human morality.