The Rich, the Poor and Justice

Try an experiment with me, a gedanken experimentelle or thought experiment as the philosopher Baruch Spinoza called it. It is commonly noted that the United States has 5% of the world’s population, but consumes 25% of the world’s annual production. This is generally regarded as an unjust rate of consumption by the United States population. For purposes of understanding let us seek a just world by reducing our level of consumption to the 5% and redistributing the rest on the same principle of fairness, namely consumption in proportion to population, to the rest of the world’s population. To achieve that level of fairness we would have to get by on 20% of what we now consume. What would your life look like if you lived on 20% of your current income? Granted this is a very rough approximation with a lot of variables in need of consideration. However, I found it surprising how many of those variables were in fact “necessities” for my standard of living. As an example, with 20% of my current income I would not be able to afford a car in our context of responsible car ownership, e.g. insurance, regular maintenance and cost of fuel. Without a car I would be dependent upon public transportation; all but non-existent in the developer’s sprawl of Temecula Valley. (For one person’s experience see Living Without a Car at http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/92528.) In short much of our infrastructure would collapse if we had to make do with 20% of our current income. At this point one begins to feel the impact of anything approaching an equitable distribution of the world’s production. Yet, if we are to avoid the chaos of a planet of the rich and the poor this is what we must do. Reaching a just and sustainable world will be the biggest challenge humans have ever faced. Obviously we in the wealthier countries of the world must radically trim our sails. We must find effective, i.e. non-corrupting, ways to transfer wealth and opportunity to the poor areas of the world. We will probably have to redefine “opportunity” in terms of some social rather than economic benefit. We must openly take on those forces that oppose population reduction as enemies of future generations and precipitators of massive human conflict and suffering. Religion must be no shelter for these forces.

This sort of thought experiment prompts us, by the enormity of necessary change it impresses upon us, to ask what conceivably can be done? We must find a way to transfer global wealth to the poor areas of our planet in a manner that causes minimal disruption of the complex systems of the developed countries. I suggest, as I have in the past, that the best way to do this is by taxing the major sources of excessive wealth and this on a global basis so that the wealthy cannot use the idiosyncrasies of national governments to escape this taxation. The device for doing this, as I have previously argued, is the Tobin Tax. This is a tax on the billions of daily financial transactions that fly around this world 24/7. The value of the Tobin Tax as a means of avoiding massive conflict and violence has not received the attention it deserves. For those of you who wish to learn more about the Tobin Tax and to think about its many ramifications please see the article on the Tobin tax in Wikipedia.

Bob Newhard