I read something interesting the other day. The writer claimed that the default setting of humans is poverty. Which is true when you think of it. For as far back in history as you can research or imagine, humans lived in poverty so vast that even the poorest person today is wealthy by comparison. People today seem to think that the hunter-gatherer culture was a myth, just a morality tale to make a point about being grateful for what we have. But that’s the way humans lived for tens of thousands of years. Even in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance years, where learning and the building arts were at a highpoint, most people lived in poverty. Not only was wealth in short supply, what there was of it remained in the hands of a very few, and even those folks — kings and other nobles — weren’t wealthy by today’s standards.
What is truly remarkable about our current life is that there is any wealth at all. Even more remarkable is that the overall wealth of the world is growing. So are opportunities to find your own source of wealth. Of course, most people don’t count wealth as I do — a warm place to live, a vehicle, appliances and all sorts of other labor saving-devices, food to buy in a grocery store rather than having the backbreaking job of growing it. There are also parks — local, state, national — to play in, and such open spaces had once been reserved for royal use only.
In today’s world, there are also all sorts of programs for people who either can’t or don’t want to work (and there are plenty of able-bodied people who simply prefer to sit around watching television six hours a day; this isn’t a guess — they make videos bragging about it). There are way too many homeless, though the money that was geared for those people seldom reached them and in fact was sometimes stolen and used by the administrators of such funds to buy multiple homes for themselves. And, too, a lot of homeless do cling to a life of addiction.
But for all that, we are generally living in a time of vast wealth — wealth that was created by human labor. (Except of course, for those who preferred to do such things as crash the currencies of other countries rather than come by their wealth honestly.) Human labor today is still creating wealth. Pulling assets from the earth, making things, selling those things, using that money to make other things and selling those other things and around and around it goes, with more wealth created every day. Working wealth — the wealth that is contained in on-going business concerns — is what keeps the world going. If there were no people creating more wealth, we’d all be scrambling for the bits that were left, until finally, the world would run down and we’d be back where we started — in abject poverty but with the memory of when we had it so good.
There is a growing hatred for the working wealth creators because people say that no one deserves the kind of wealth that some entrepreneurs have managed to accumulate (though they say nothing about the non-working billionaires who are funding the insurrections in this country), but the truth is, the wealth of the working rich is in their businesses. They do not have cash sitting in a bank. Very few of the working wealth-creators have cash on hand. Their money goes into their businesses, which creates more wealth by creating more jobs, more products, even a higher standard to strive for.
Although the working wealthy are using their wealth to create more wealth for everyone, too many people think it needs to be stolen from them and given to those who don’t have the ability to create wealth. The problem is, if these working wealthy were to pay the vast sums in taxes that people think they need to pay, the wealthy would have to sell off large chunks of their businesses, which means they would lose control of their own companies, which means there would be a dearth of working capital, which means less aggregate wealth in the world.
With their money always in use, many (maybe even most) people who own high-performing businesses, borrow money to pay their employees because they are cash poor. Cash in constant circulation creates more wealth, more jobs, more . . . possibilities.
Humans are the ones who have created the wealth in the world today. As far as I know, dollars didn’t spew out with the big bang or on creation day or however the world came into being. Wealth came from human labor.
There used to be a time when people would hear of someone getting super rich and would think, “I can do that. Become rich. Maybe. Someday.” Now people see the wealth that’s created and they think, “They need to take his wealth away from him so I can get me some of that.”
Wealth isn’t a matter of everyone having the same amount of money because if were, then there would be no money. If you take from the “haves” and give to “have less,” then why would anyone do anything to create wealth just to have it taken from them? They wouldn’t. Which would leave everyone sinking back into the default mode of poverty. Besides, if all the billionaires in the USA — supposedly there’s fewer than 1,000 of them — were taxed 100%, their taxes would fund the government for less than two years, so it’s much better to let them keep creating wealth.
People complain about loopholes that the wealthy businesses use to bring their taxes down, so the answer is not to take even more of their money but to lobby to close the loopholes, assuming those are loopholes and not just a way for the money to keep working. But for the most part, the taxes the wealthy pay are dependent on many things, so one year a fellow can pay 11 billion and the next year nothing. And even if the companies end up not paying taxes, the owners who take a salary and all the people they have working for them pay taxes, and generally a lot of taxes, because many of them become very high earners, so the aggregate taxes paid ends up being significant.
Whether or not the working wealthy “deserve” the money they make, is almost beside the point. Nowadays, I’d prefer to leave wealth in the hands of those who created it and who are continuing to create it. If you took it from them in the form of punitive taxes, then it would disappear into the same grifters’ hands where so much of the working people’s taxes are ending up. Why people are so accepting of that money being stolen, I have no idea, but throwing more money into a grifters pool does no one any good.
Either way, it doesn’t matter since the money is not going to end up in our pockets, neither mine nor yours.
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One
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