The
trouble the very rich cause the rest of us is not so much what they
have got, so much as that they use their money to shape change in
their own interests. This can be direct intervention in democratic
process through party donations. It can be through influence at many
levels. It can be through their business decisions. It can be through
ownership of media. It can be through distorting markets (think of
London house prices).
The
very rich tend to think that they deserve the wealth they control.
Even where the wealth is a direct consequence of a valuable social or
economic contribution this is rarely really the case. Rather there is
a mix of luck and riding on the backs of other very rich people who
have shaped the rule book to suit themselves.
The
purpose of money in a modern economy is to enable the vast number of
exchanges that contribute to our collective well being. If people
don't have full and fair access to money it constrains their ability
to contribute and to have access to the resources needed to
contribute. In the end, the value of money is not a promise from a
central bank, nor is it precious metal; it is the promise to
contribute value through our collective efforts, such that future
well being is assured.
In
a complex economy the point where value is realised is frequently far
away from where the value was created. We all know how the money in
coffee is in roasting and retailing, not in growing and processing
the beans in the mountains of Central America. In a globalized
economy, the opportunity for the super rich is to control the points
where value is realized and where possible to avoid the wealth
captured being taxed for redistribution back to the people whose work
created the wealth in the first place.
The
consequence for the rest of us of this gross inequality is not only
that we may be poorer than we might have been; it is that we have
surrendered the power to improve what we do and how we do it. We
constantly find our lives as workers and consumers being defined by
the interests of a self serving finance system and massive
corporations jostling to gain monopoly control.
We
can only guess how things might be different if the very wealthy were
not so actively advancing their own short term interests, but they
deserve at the least the spotlight of concern that they are
collectively guilty of massive crimes against humanity.
