When large institutions and corporations manage all the collective money, individuals in those 'clubs' are often provided access to lavish lifestyles and seemingly infinite wealth. People on the outside, however, are left with next to nothing; a system of oppression, poverty, and helplessness. An unfortunate side effect of capitalism is that it creates a two class system - those with all the wealth and those with none of it. And of course, those with all the wealth manage both resources and influence. Policies are made by those at the top, and largely ignore how it effects large chunks of the population. Laws and regulations tend to ignore those at the top entirely, via loopholes or outright inability to prosecute. Wealthy individuals are untouchable in the eyes of words on paper; mortality, however, remains constant.
We seem to forget that wealthy individuals are simple, fragile human beings just like everyone else. Sure, some people might be smarter, or taller, or faster, or better public speakers, but in the end, we all suffer, we all feel the same emotions, and we all bleed the same. What makes one person worth so much more than everyone else? They can speak on TV? They were lucky enough to grow up in the right family? They had the tremendous opportunity to trick people out of their money for something that had little or no value?
Why do we, as human beings, allow individuals to have so much more than everyone else?
Objective facts show that one person does not need more wealth than what is acceptable. But how much is acceptable? What are those objective facts?
I'd like to explore what those might be. In reality, I'm limited by the amount of time I can put into this, so I'll try to summarize and ask questions where further exploration is needed.
First, let's assign an individual human being a monetary value. Insurance (you know, betting against a company that something will happen - a form of gambling) allows us to access data that places monetary value on human life. In short, at the time of this writing, the value of human life in America hovers around $10 million or about $128,000 per year.¹
That gives us a good baseline for what our minimum and maximum should be. For practical purposes, I'm going to assign a humanist minimum at the poverty threshold, because I believe that all human beings have the inherent right to survival. $12,800 - one-tenth of the total value, or about $1 million over their whole life.² From that, it's easy to extrapolate the maximum value to be $1.28 million per year, or $100 million for their lifetime.
That's it. $100 million is the most an individual should have for their whole life. That value also assumes extremely valuable contribution(s), such as quality leadership or meritorious innovation. So why do we allow individuals to accumulate billions?
The finer details become grayed when you consider the valuations of resources and capital and otherwise non-tangible goods, not to mention corporate holdings. Part of the problem today is that we tend to accredit stock valuation when determining an individual's wealth, never mind the fact that stocks aren't real - they only demarcate an emotional value. What happens when the stock market crashes and many/most company's values go back to zero? What happens when a corporation and its products are no longer relevant? Supposedly, market forces and capitalism should more or less handle these events without outside intervention. But that's not happening, at least not as quickly as it needs to.
The next pertinent question is, how do we balance the current situation? The wealthy have already been allowed to consolidate wealth, so how do we convince them to reinvest in the world they occupy?
The obvious answer is climate change. There won't be a world to live in, reasonably, without direct and massive efforts towards reigning in our impact on nature. Refocusing on sustainability instead of growth. Putting millions of people to work on conservation efforts would be an easy way for a wealthy individual or a powerful corporation to reinvest in communities.
Decentralizing food production (massive land grant programs in fostering new small farms) could invert the trend of people moving to city centers and creating wealth drains. In most cases, a minimum supplemental income could foster a massive re-balancing of wealth from rich to poor, while simultaneously reinvigorating small towns. The point is, there's so much that the wealthy could do - that's the point, they have the resources - they should be the ones asking what they can do for us.
Then, maybe, if the responsible adults realize they can facilitate the change that will make the world better, we can all decide to limit the wealth individuals can have, and perhaps even have control over (i.e. limit corporate wealth). Why is it just a few dozen people get to decide what to do with hundreds of thousands of people's worth of resources?
Why can't we utilize the technology and data we now possess to automatically elect representatives for every neighborhood?
