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Gary Smith's avatar

The ultra-wealthy are perfectly happy to keep us poorer folk artificially divided by "left vs right" and "urban vs rural" and skin color and immigration status, and so on, busily blaming each other for the world's problems. Many of them invest in media conglomerates to keep those distraction narratives flowing and prevent the blame from falling where it really belongs.

Maybe it's math illiteracy that keeps many people from realizing just how poor we actually are compared to the 1% or even the 5% at the top; from realizing that nobody possibly works a billion times harder than everyone else to "earn" that wealth; from realizing that the ultra-wealthy could easily solve many of the world's urgent problems if they would give up only a small percentage of their wealth, money they could not spend in a 100 lifetimes anyway.

Any dream you have of joining those people is pure fantasy. The game is very much rigged, and the income of the ultra-wealthy is ultimately skimmed from the productivity of the billions of others working hard beneath them. It will be a truly interesting day if the majority of people ever reach these conclusions.

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joe hartnett's avatar

Dear Katie (if I may call you so),

This is an admirably concise lesson for all humans.

I find myself wondering if a more refined definition of capital might help us reorder the unequal distribution of resources.

What if we began by (finally and realistically) assuming that Capital is universally owned, first by Planet Earth as a whole, organic "being" and then equally by all life on earth? Each blade of grass, each river, each porcupine, each mountain, each homo sapiens, each butterfly is part of this global capital. Then, if we were to allocate a monetary value to each of these elements of Planet Earth's bounty, there could eventually and inevitably occur a fair accounting of what everyone and everything on Planet Earth is worth.

Take the Mississippi River. What is the actual cost (to Planet Earth, plus all life on Earth, etc.) for company A to use this mighty river for its business of hauling appliances or produce or people from town to town? Included, of course, would be the negative costs of harm done to the river and its aquatic residents whether animal or plant, by this company's equipment profile? To whom should these fees be paid?

Instead of Taxes, what if everyone and everyithing was entitled to send and receive invoices to be covered by users of Earth's bounty?

Crazy? Of course. But, is it?

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