WEALTH
Distribution, a Perennial Problem:
Now
in Crisis!
JAMES
RAYMOND FISHER, JR., Ph.D.
©
January 17, 2017
THE AMERICAN COLONIES, 1776
We Americans are familiar with “The
Declaration of Independence” written by Thomas Jefferson and approved by the Second
Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. On the following day, 12 of the 13 colonies
voted in favor of Richard Henry Lee’s motion for independence from Great
Britain.
The language of this declaration
was influenced largely by the Scottish philosopher John Locke with the
designation of self-evident truths; that
all men are created equal; and that they are endowed by their creator with
certain inalienable rights; that among these rights are the right to life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
John Locke had insisted that
people had “the right to life, liberty and property” or tangible wealth. The idea, in any case, was that the people
were the ultimate sovereign power in a nation.
It was an egalitarian moment but imbued with more idealism than realism
from the start.
Negro slaves were not included in
this dictum. All thirteen colonies had
slaves from the northeast to the southeast along the Atlantic Ocean. The prosperity of Virginia and the Carolinas
depended largely on the toil of black slaves producing tobacco, rice and indigo
for export. To the north, cities
dominated the colonial economies of 1776.
Philadelphia, with 24,000 inhabitants, New York City with 22,000 and
Newport with 11,000 were port cities that lived off of foreign and coastal
trade, finance and some manufacturing.
Inequality was severe. The richest tenth of the colonial population
owned more than 50 percent of the total wealth with the richest 1 percent
owning 15 percent, while the bottom fifth of the population were treated as a species
of property with no legal rights as they could own nothing. That bottom fifth of slaves existed in every
colony.
The next 30 percent of Americans –
just above slavery – owned no more than 3 percent of the country’s total
wealth. These included landless laborers
many of whom were immigrants. Nearly 70
percent of all white people were farmers, whose income fluctuated with the
weather and local economic conditions.
Native Americans were a non-factor as they had been decimated by
European diseases.
FAST FORWARD TO 21ST CENTURY
In a book TATE Publishing has not
yet published, I write in “The Worker,
Alone! Going Against the Grain”:
More
evidence that people of this planet, not only the United States, live in an
upside down world is that in 2014 the British
Oxfam International Humanitarian Group reported that the 85 richest
people in the world equaled the wealth of the bottom half of the global
population. Stated another way, about 3.5 billion people, or half the world’s
population account for about $1.7 trillion, or about 0.7 percent of the world’s
wealth. Some $1.7 trillion happens to be the same amount attributed to the
world’s 85 richest people.
That was 2014. Fast forward to 2017, and the Associate Press
reports that that 85 richest people has been whittled down to an incredulous
eight individuals who have as much wealth as 3.6 billion people.
These eight individuals are:
Bill Gates: $75 billion,
co-founder of Microft; Amancio Ortega: $67 billion, controller of Zara fashion
shops and the Inditex Group; Warren Buffet, $60.8 billion, head of the Oracle
of Omaha, and investment group; Carlos Slim Helu, $50 billion, major owner of
America Movil; Jeff Bezos, $45.2 billion, founder of Amazon.com; Mark
Zuckerberg, $44.6 billion, founder of Facebook; Larry Ellison, $43.6 billion,
creator of databases that have become industry standards; Michael Bloomberg,
$40, former mayor of New York City who created a financial information system.
Over the past three years (2014 –
2017) wealth has shrunk from 85 individuals to 8, but it has been a fait accompli over the last 340 years
(at least) or since that 1776 “Declaration of Independence” with the idealistic
assumption that “all men are created equal,” being only that, an ideal.
Also profiled in “The Worker,
Alone” is this:
Nobel
laureate (2001) in Economics Joseph E. Stiglitz argues in “The Price of Inequality” (2013) that
America currently has the most inequality, and the least equality of
opportunity among the advanced countries. While market forces play a role in
this stark picture, politics has shaped those market forces. In this book,
Stiglitz exposes the efforts of well-heeled interests to compound their wealth
in ways that have stifled true, dynamic capitalism. Along the way he examines
the effect of inequality on our economy, our democracy, and our system of
justice, while explaining how inequality affects and is affected by every aspect
of national policy, and offers a vision for a more just and prosperous future,
supported by a concrete program to achieve that vision.
He
claims that while Congress reduced the taxes on the super rich and deregulated
corporate operations in the 1980s to enlarge the economic pie, hoping that the
middle class and those at the bottom would benefit, what has happened is that
now the top 1 percent actually controls 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.
This
patriarchal society, where wealth and power reside in the privileged few, has
denied repeatedly of being anachronistic as empires, emperors and despots.
Feebly,
in 2011, a movement developed which called itself “Occupy Wall Street” with the
slogan “We are the 99%.” This referred to income inequality in particular, and
affluence inequality in general in the United States. The movement got media attention,
but ran out of steam by late 2013, and nothing changed.
That
said the “1%” is more a global than a national reality, as one percent of the
world’s population has amassed about 46 percent of the world’s wealth, or $110
trillion. That is 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s
population. This should give those of unrestrained affluence little comfort as
revolutions have erupted on less obvious premises.
A
patriarchal driven society pushes for morality, which is only a mindset of the
time, not a definitive proposition. While parents push for “what should be,”
children escape into impulsive pleasure.
Parents, mystified by their collective ineptitude, abandon their values and
join their children in “joy-living” distracting aberrations. It is the world of
everything, anything, now!
WHY THE PROBLEM, AN THE INEVITABLE
CONSEQUENCES!
Oxfam, which conducted the original
study to which I referred to in my book, also has conducted the more recent
study. Oxfam urges leaders to do more
than lip-service to the problem. This
well intentioned declaration is meaningless, as is the statement by Winnie
Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International. He writes:
“It
is obscene for so much wealth to be held in the hands of so few when 1 in 10
people survive on less than $2 a day.
Inequality is trapping hundreds of millions in poverty; it is fracturing
our societies and undermining democracy.”
Words and good intentions come
out of Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz as well, but they are fruitless when the
movers and shakers are too busy, too isolated and expected to do far more than
they are capable of doing.
In France, we had the French
Revolution of 1789 followed by the “Reign of Terror” in which the king and
queen lost their heads on the guillotine.
The pulse of the time was in Paris while King Louis XVI was isolated
from this tumult a dozen miles away – more than a day’s travel then – at the
Court of Versailles.
Queen Marie Antoinette had a
retinue of scores of valets meeting her every demand, while the king spent much
of his working day receiving ambassadors and prelates and endless members of
other royal households as well as presiding over formal presentations at the court
of nobles.
The palace at Versailles was a
place of beauty, majesty, prestige and outrageous luxury, but it was also a
prison as the king was mainly ignorant of what 99 percent of his kingdom was
about.
The court was so involved in the
business of royalty that it had little inclination or regard for imagining the
problems of the 99 percent and therefore without a clue or disposition to
commit resources in innovative ways to deal with such issues.
You may call this “a lack of
leadership” in the aristocracy of the time, but that same lack and
preoccupation, updated to the present persists, has changed little. Like the king, these modern “robber barons”
are imprisoned in their sanctuaries while occasionally throwing money at the
problem.
You say they have their
philanthropies, which they all do, but commitment to the issues at hand is not
equal to their involvement.
You cannot understand the
problems of the 99 percent unless you walk in their moccasins. Stated another way, unless these billionaires
launch a major intervention equivalent to invading and occupying another country
in a “nation building” enterprise, nothing happens. Remember, 1789 and the “Reign of Terror” was
not a mirage.
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