With Sanders, I won’t get my hopes up. But his experience of sudden wealth ought at least to temper the hard and ugly edges of his class-war politics. Getting rich is not a form of theft. As often as not, it’s the result of a service. Being rich is not a sin. Typically, it’s the result of long labor, patient saving, prudent investment, gutsy risk-taking, and some stroke of originality.

And becoming richer is no shame. Wealth and philanthropy tend to correlate. Of America’s 10 richest people, four have given away at least $1 billion and/or 20 percent of their net worth to charity. In terms of charitable donations by individuals as a percentage of G.D.P., the United States is by far the most generous, giving $410 billion to charity in 2017. The average American gives nearly twice as much to charity as the average New Zealander, the runner-up among giving nations.

A Sanders supporter might concede some of this, while rejoining that great wealth is inherently corrupting (and unnecessary), and that great inequality is inherently dangerous to democracy (and just plain wrong). That’s the thinking that now animates the movement on the left to get rid of billionaires altogether, or at least cut them down to size with punitive taxation.

Yet it’s never been clear why it’s immoral to be a billionaire but not a mere millionaire — other than, perhaps, the envy that those whose income is in the 95th percentile (college professors, for instance) tend to feel toward those in the 99th (finance people). Is there a consistent moral principle that distinguishes the relative goodness of five, six or even seven zeroes in your portfolio versus the badness of eight or a full nine?

It’s also unclear how Steve Jobs’s or Bill Gates’s fortunes ever denied anyone a penny, except for the dollars voluntarily shelled out to purchase iPhones and Windows. In the U.S., billionaires don’t take wealth, as Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes, or Chinese officials do. They create it. And in creating it, they create jobs, opportunities, services, choice, equity, efficiencies, and sometimes even beauty — the reason why capitalist societies are invariably more attractive and dynamic than non-capitalist ones.