Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders spoke in Boulder on Wednesday and bashed the rich. The Democratic socialist was so embarrassing the crowd occasionally responded with nervous and underwhelming applause.

If one thing is clear about multi-millionaire Sanders, it is his professed disdain for the rich. He has money and his friends have money, yet all the other rich are evil.

Sanders came to Colorado to stump all day for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jared Polis, who is among the wealthiest men in the country.

“Today in America, as all of you know, we have a corrupt campaign system which allows billionaires to buy elections,” Sanders said.

As Sanders prattled, Polis stood nearby as the national symbol of a rich man buying an election. To date, he has spent more than $20 million in personal wealth to fund his campaign. He has spent millions in the past funding his campaigns for the Colorado Board of Education and the U.S. House of Representatives.

Polis famously used his personal wealth to help change Colorado’s political landscape, along with billionaire heiress Pat Stryker and two other mega-wealthy friends, in a left-wing campaign known as The Colorado Blueprint.

Sanders, with a straight face, blasted big money in politics to promote the man who popularized big money in politics. It doesn’t get weirder than that.

Just as Polis symbolizes money in politics, he exemplifies why the super rich are an asset to the masses. He has founded or co-founded at least 20 companies, beginning in his college years.

Two years after Polis graduated from Princeton, a California company bought his tech startup American Information Systems for $23 million. Polis sold his family’s online greeting card company a few years later for nearly $800 million. He started ProFlowers and sold it for about a half-billion dollars.

During his service in Congress for the past nine years, Polis has doubled his personal wealth.

All that is good for the country. Americans should applaud anyone who creates wealth with constructive endeavors. In pursuing success, the wealthy create jobs and improve the way we live. Electronic greeting cards ease the process and reduce the cost of brightening someone’s day. So does ProFlowers, which dispatches orders straight from growers to make gifts of bouquets fresher and less costly.

Wealth is good. Neither Polis nor Sanders became rich by taking from the poor. Sanders made $1 million in 2016 alone, with a $795,000 book advance, speaking fees, and his $174,000 congressional salary. He writes books people want. He serves in a public capacity the public is willing to pay for. He gets rich as a result of his actions.

Yet, Sanders insists a rich man is a poor man’s problem.

“It is not acceptable that the top one-tenth of one percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent,” Sander said. “That it is not acceptable that over 40 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent.”

In that case, Sanders and Polis should have stopped talking Wednesday and written checks to everyone in the crowd to even things out. Each man falls into the top 1 percent, and Polis ranks high among the one-tenth of the top one percent.

Disdain for the rich only stands to hurt the middle class. Rich people create the homes people live in, the cars they drive, and the online services that ease their lives. They own the drilling operations that provide the fuel that transported Sanders and Polis to Boulder.

If we crush the rich, we burden the middle class and the poor. That is why Polis avoids supporting Proposition 112. The measure would impose setbacks on energy production, burdening the rich. The proposed restrictions would push the oil and gas industry out of Colorado. That would throw the state’s economy into recession, killing hundreds of thousands of middle-class jobs and depriving public schools of billions in funding over time.

For declining to support Prop 112, supporters of the measure drown out Polis on Wednesday with chants so loud no one could hear him talk. These are the activists whom socialist Sanders and the like turned against oil and gas, and other forms of wealth.

Sanders, Polis and other socialistic 1-percenters will regret seeking political gain by fomenting class envy. Without the rich, we will have no middle class and the poor will get poorer.