This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 13, 2012.

I'm Kiblet Brown.

Lots of people don't like rich people, but aside from having a falsely static view of the size of the economic pie, why is that the case?

Aaron Powell is editor of Libertarianism.org.

He argues that it's quite simply that for many rich people we just don't know what they do so

it's harder to understand why they're so wealthy. The Occupy Wall Street

movement has been very mad at rich people, the 99% versus the 1%.

But I was struck by an inconsistency in the way that they apply that anger.

Namely, they say they're mad at the rich, they're mad at people who have 1% of the income, which would presumably include

all rich people, however they got that money. But the anger that they show is directed at

a narrow subset of the rich. It's mostly bankers, hedge fund managers, CEOs. It doesn't

tend to be professional athletes or actors or people like Steve Jobs who make products that they all like.

And in trying to understand why there was this inconsistency, what was different about the people they got mad at and the people

they didn't, I was struck by the differences in the jobs between those two groups.

Namely, if I think about people like a quarterback or an actor, they have what I call a

clear job, which is I both can see the product of what they do. I can understand it.

They that's that person on the movie screen acting well or that pass was

completed for a touchdown or Steve Jobs made my iPhone. So I can see the product and I

can understand the connection between what they did and how they got to it. I can

see the throw. I can see that Steve Jobs had this idea and

it turned into the iPhone. I can see that this person gets up there and reads a script and

acts. Whereas hedge fund managers, I don't know what a hedge fund manager does. I don't really

...