I felt that way for a long time. I am basically living that philosophy. My blog[1] has always been free to read and free from ads. I wrote a book[2], and you can read the entire thing online for free, again with no ads. Almost all the code I write is open source.
I imagined a utopia where all kinds of creative people would have enough free time to pursue their hobbies and share the fruits of their labor. I am lucky enough to basically live that utopia now—I happen to love programming, which is a very lucrative field.
It's fine to dream of a world where my personal utopia is more widely available, but that world isn't here today. You can think of a culture or society as the aggregate sum of all of its shared creative works.
When creative works can only be done by those who can afford the leisure, it skews society towards the perspective of the rich. Think back to 19th century English literature and how few novels there are that show how regular working-class people lived. That's because regular working-class people back then were too busy working in the mines to write a book.
There are some counterexamples, sure, but even most of those were created by rich people observing the poor from a distance. As sympathetic as Dickens was towards the poor, the stories he tells are still different from what an actual poor person would tell.
You can see this happening in the US now. Over the past thirty years, the middle class has gradually gotten sucked dry. Here's a fun game: try to find a wide release Hollywood movie where the main characters are "middle class" and where the sets actually resemble a real middle-class life.
The most striking example I've seen was "This is 40". There, every single dramatic point of the film was about money problems, and yet the characters lived in a giant mansion, drove two late model high end cars, and threw an enormous outdoor catered birthday party, all without, apparently, any irony or self-awareness.
This is because many of the people producing creative works today are out of touch with how the increasingly large number of poor people live. And the poor people are too worked to the bone to contribute their own story.
The end result is increased ignorance about how the bottom half (hell, 90%) of the world lives, and that ignorance is what leads to many of the structural problems causing increased economic disparity.
If we're going to help the poor and increase equality, we need to hear their stories. And we won't do that if they can't afford the time to share them.
[1]: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/ [2]: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/
