Earlier quoted context omitted.
>assets capture by tiny percent of the population Those asserts were _created_ by a tiny percent of the population; if they hadn't been allowed to create those assets then they wouldn't exist. Europe is an example of that: it has only 2 companies in the Fortune 500 (500 biggest companies) that were created in the past 20 years, i.e. essentially no tech industry there. Because the policies there make entrepreneurship…
And is life in Europe actually worse than the US as a result? Capitalism has convinced people to think that the end goal of life is creating value. Maybe that isn't the thing society should be optimizing for.
> Average Western European living standards appear much closer to those in the United States (around 85 percent for welfare versus 67 percent for income) when we take into account Europe’s longer life expectancy, addi- tional leisure time, and lower inequality.
Jones, Charles I.; Klenow, Peter J. (September 2016). "Beyond GDP? Welfare across Countries and Time". American Economic Review. *106* (9): 2426–2457. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20110236. ISSN 0002-8282. S2CID 1352951.