For decades, fiscal and monetary policy has preferred spending over investment. Central banks hold interest rates below their free market equilibrium, enabling governments to engage in permanent deficit spending and encouraging poor investment decisions. Collectively, the developed world is eating its seed corn and impoverishing itself, so it's inevitable that the vast majority of people are failing to accumulate wealth. And don't blame 401K plans, the economic landscape is littered with professionally managed funds so underfunded that bankruptcy is almost certain.

The solution: eliminate corporate income taxes, put shareholders in control of corporations, give everyone an unlimited tax-free savings account, prosecute fraud aggressively, and return to the gold standard.