I believe it is time that we stop moralizing about the
unfairness of wealth and the opportunities it affords that are not available to
those lacking wealth. Wealth has social consequences inimical to society and
the stability it requires.
In his book The Price of Inequality: How Today's
Divided Society Endangers Our Future Joe Stiglitz remarks the role of inequality in the major social
revolutions of 1848 and 1958 and speculates that 2011 may turn out to be another
such seminal period because of the pervasive inequality.
But how does wealth distort society? Let me count the
ways.
Wealth is power and as it is much more likely to attract
additional wealth than is non-wealth (the poor are a notoriously lousy
investment for the money-focused wealthy), it increasingly concentrates wealth
and the power it generates into fewer and fewer hands. To paraphrase Lord Acton
Power corrupts and increasing power
increasingly corrupts. This power has distorted our political process so thoroughly
that our democracy is now a hollow version of its former self. This power now
permeates every aspect of our society including economics, law, media, war,
education both general and academic, etc.
Wealth as a goal badly distorts our ability to deal
with the major threats our species faces. It replaces a concern for our planet and
our species with a concern for money and profit. Neither of these meets any
fundamental human need.
Wealth replaces human value with monetary value and
makes of human beings factotums in the market place with money equivalents not
unlike the machines used to produce our goods. Indeed, we are often more
concerned for the machine than the human. We allow businesses to amortize the
value of a machine over time thereby reducing taxes on it, but do not allow the
worker to amortize her/his body as it wears out. They are just fired.
Even if wealth did not result in excessive power it
would still be distorting to society. If it could only be used to denote status
as Thorstein Veblen describes in his Theory
of the Leisure Class or as in Samuel Butler’s Erewon in which the Musical Bank issued non-negotiable money that
represented prestige only, wealth would still have the pernicious influence of dividing
society along artificial lines that would take its focus off valuing human wellbeing.
All of this criticism is based on the social evil of
creating distinctions that generate asocial grouping based on the assumption of
some groups that they are superior to other groups and that superiority per se is of fundamental importance.
Aldous Huxley was sensitive to the human proclivity to
place undue value on difference in his novel Brave New World in which human beings were bred from the embryo on
up to do certain jobs so that there would be no social crises due to unrealized
expectations or sense of inferiority or superiority. In the rare event this
discontent did arise a soma pill
would alleviate any undue stress.
We must begin to view wealth as at least a threat, if
not an enemy of, a stable democratic society and mitigate its accumulation out
of that concern. Children should not be encouraged to go forth and seek their
fortune as has been a centuries-long mantra in American society, now commonly
called “success.”
But, it is said by the wealth-instilled conventional
wisdom that without great wealth as a stimulant we will not get the innovation
that a vibrant economy requires. In this regard a recently read article comes
to mind.
The federal government has a new program to make the
country a leader in battery technology. The plan calls for the Argonne National Laboratory, which has
considerable experience developing the lithium-ion battery that now powers
everything from cell phones to the Tesla all-electric very fast luxury
automobile, to lead this project. A number of university laboratories will work
in cooperation with Argonne and the results of their development will be turned
over to corporations to develop and market products. The major innovation here is to be found
in the government and other non-profit institutions. The private sector
contributes a secondary level of innovation in developing products for the
market and in the process these for-profit companies create excessive wealth
that plays havoc with everything from financial stability to environmental
destruction to social stability. Obviously highly qualified people work for the
Argonne Laboratory, as they do in university research laboratories. They are
well paid, but rather than being motivated by aspirations to become billionaires
they find satisfaction in the knowledge they create. Another example is the
Internet developed totally at government expense to mitigate damage to the
nation’s communications system in the event of a nuclear attack. The private
sector was allowed to use this system thereby generating behemoths of the
Google and Amazon size, which avoided paying sales taxes for years until states
began forcing them to do so. Again, this was billions in revenues that could
have been used for society’s betterment. My point here is that contrary to the constantly-pushed
claptrap from the business community, we do not need free market capitalism to generate
innovation. Additionally, we can no longer afford the liabilities free market
capitalism introduces into a democratic society.
So, what should replace it? If you talk to people in
the professions and sciences you will find that interest in the subject was and
continues to be a prime motivator. Of course they want a reasonable income, but
dreams of great wealth are seldom what inspire them.
What if the corrupting wealth that now flows to the
ever fewer was taxed at 90% as it was under Franklin Roosevelt and what if
those moneys were invested in creating clean energy solutions, massive
rebuilding and improving of the nation’s infrastructure and to help people
through adequate funding of public education and affordable academic education?
These societal needs and desires are, after all, the price we pay for
tolerating excessive wealth.
Finally, as technology continues to erode the role of
the job as a means of distributing society’s wealth-generating productivity, it
will be necessary to create a job-sharing labor market if we are to continue to
use the job as the means of maintaining a fair distribution of wealth.
The standard
argument from the likes of the National Chamber of Commerce that increasing the
cost of products by using more people to produce them would price American
products out of the market, would be dealt the death blow it so richly deserves
because the excess wealth now going to those who have no need for it would be
used to keep the price of American products reasonable. It is high time we
added up the cost of excessive wealth and used the power of taxation to
mitigate its adverse impacts and redirect the flow of wealth to society as a
whole. We have done it before. It is high time we did it again.
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