It is because only a very few know how things work.

You can read more of my articles. But, I recommend a very educational article by a fellow writer from Norway, https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/how-norway-got-rich-against-all-odds-before-oil-a597885df7c9.

He explains perfectly how Scandinavians skillfully used the developments available thanks to nasty capitalism elsewhere. They can afford their welfare as long as they do not need to pay the full price for the progress achieved far away. Without that brutal capitalism, they still might be living content but poor. With their model in leading industrial nations, we all would be poor.