Equalizing Power and Wealth

SEVEN HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE live on two dollars a day or less, according to studies. The top one one percent of the world's population owns twenty percent of the world's wealth, and the top twenty percent owns eighty percent of it. Statistics like this are of course everywhere. If not always precisely accurate, they are always highly indicative. Combined, they paint a picture of a troubled planetary civilization, struggling under the burden of highly inefficient economic and management systems. It doesn't have to be like that. For a few humdred billion dollars a year, a mere fraction of the global production, our existing systems could be altered to accomodate all of us, rather than an elite few. Humans are of course not the only species of animal whose members tend to seek to accumulate a surplus of resources as a precaution against future deprivation. Squirrels, rats, and mice come to mind, among others. We humans, we'll have to admit, do take it to an extreme. If all the wealth in the world were equally distributed every person might be able to live at least a working class lifestyle, if not lower middle or middle class. Elon Musk is evidently enriching himself so rapidly that soon his personal wealth will equal that of the lower fifty percent of the rest of humanity. That's shocking and obscene, most folks will agree. Maybe some day all the world's wealth, money, land, and personal property, will be in the hands of a single individual, who, assuming he or she is a normal human being, will leverage the wealth to enslave the human race. Absolute economic equality, rigorously enforced by law, might not be desirable, but by the same token, extreme inequality, extreme concnetration of wealth is much less desirable. Even the most fervant neoliberal free market capitalist will likely concede that there is a limit to which concentration of wealth can be tolerated in a free democratic society. The problem is that in a free society, money is equal to political power, and in a democracy, at least supposedly, all citizens possess equal political power, and the leaders are mere representatives of the power of society. Justice Brandeis was dead on when he remakred that we can have a country where everyone has equal wealth, or we can live in a society in whcih everybody has equal political power, but we cannot live in a society in which everyone has both. The main free market benefit to greater if not absolute economic equality consists in the reality that as the aggregate wealth of the poorest class increases, so does consumer spending, as income and disposable income grow. Trickle down economics is fine, if the downward flow of wealth is steady and substantial, and is reinvested. The point is that there is plenty of wealth to go around, plenty of food, for example, to feed everyone. Hunger, starvation, famine anywhere on Earth is unnecessary, arguably immoral, revealing inefficient systems of distribution. Obviously, there is a limit somewhere to human population growth, unless the universe fill uo with people. the same goes for our material possessions. There must, at some point, arrive an end to capitalism, as John Maynard Keynes adroitly pointed out. For us a good first step would be to sever the conncection between personal wealth and political power. Like Truman said, anybody who gets rich in politics is a crook. Wealthy people and corporations should not be allowed to purchase political power or to even influence public policy with money. We are currently embarked on an opposite course, towards ever great political and financial corruption. Our success in reversing this trend will determine our success in mass poverty, extreme concentration of wealth, and ultimately, unbridled political power in the hans of a single corrupted tyrant.