The Rich Are Too Powerful

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.