Economists have taken considerable interest of late in the
growing disparity between the top 1% of the wealthy and the rest of us.
Professor Piketty, Capital in the
Twenty-First Century, presents the data disclosing what creates the
disparity. The causes parallel the old aphorism of the self-fulfilling
prophecy. When the income from more valuable assets exceeds the growth of
everyone else's income, people with the better assets have more disposable
income to re-invest thus ever widening the gap. Without government
intervention, them that has is them that gets.
Danny Darling clearly states the consequences in Inequality and the 1%. The most vulnerable people are being punished for their poverty so that extremely wealthy people can continue their disproportionate access to more wealth. The very wealthy tell us poverty exposes those lacking in initiative--another self-fulfilling-prophecy. Deprived of assets, the poor get poorer. Ultimately, the disappearance of disposable income in the majority will wreck the economy for everyone.
The bubbles the rich create to make themselves richer always explode. Everyone's economy is in jeopardy, except the super rich who often find a way to profit from it. Even more perplexing, is the fact that the solution is clear: taxes on the rich (recently repealed with more cuts coming). The real problem is not the government's failure to manage money, but how to keep the rich from managing it.
Hence, politics becomes the issue, but raising taxes is no longer politically correct. The rich have won the culture war. There is a class war going on based entirely on money. Racism and the rest of the civil rights agenda are pre-empted by millions of dollars donated by the super rich for propaganda discrediting anything liberal and painting empathy as cowardice.
In the debate between those who would distribute wealth horizontally and those who would distribute it vertically, there lies, sub-silentio, the question whether or not the biosphere can support horizontal distribution (a large middle class). Social Darwinism conflates biological and economic evolution. The very rich speak in tongues to hide their Darwinian position, namely, that the poor, lacking in the ability to adapt to the rule of money, must be allowed to starve to death. Nature is a cruel master. We must obey it. This unstated apology for greed can only avoid condemnation under the propaganda so adroitly managed by those who control the media. Guess who that is.
See Natural Selection's Paradox--The Outlaw Gene, the Religion of Money, and the Origin of Evil, by Carter Stroud, for the science and history for this proposition.
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