Consumers are wealth creators,

They are the ones who create the demand which in turns creates jobs.

It's disingenuous for the wealthy to claim the title as wealth creator.

The savage irony is, as the spending power the middle-classes/working classes erodes further & further we will no longer be able to maintain cyclic consumption & the entire system will collapse.

This is why true "free market" capitalism can't & does not work - the end result of a true capitalist model is one person owning everything - cartels/price fixing & the complete annihilation of the middle class are the final stage of the model.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBx2Y5HhplI

Nick Hanauer, a very successful venture capitalist has a number of talks on this very subject.

Except for the fact that we are not a true free market capitalist society. We haven't been for a very long time. We like to believe we are. But if we were then the government wouldn't be bailing out major corporations or providing massive amounts of subsidies. We have, for the very large part, a corporatist government that is eroding the capitalist society.

I agree you are not, it's more a plutocracy with extreme corporatist tendencies.

But even if it wasn't, the entire concept of "free market capitalism" is flawed, for the reason that unrestricted the end result is one person owning everything - even if our current distorted version of capitalism this is slowly becoming reality (as the gap between the bottom & top 20% widens in the entire developed world).