Unequal

What started out as a single post has now miraculously morphed into a series of four!

This eclectic assemblage of ramblings has thus far encompassed cricket, the demise of socialism and sun-worship.

What can it all mean?

Time to wrap it up…

My theme is – of course – inequality. I have addressed the topic a number of times before (here, here, here and here) and the gentle reader will doubtless have deduced by now that it is a subject that exercises me greatly.

Simply put – excessive and increasing inequality in any society is a bad thing and can only – in the long run – lead to disaster.

The free market is a valuable tool. It generates wealth, encourages competition and promotes progress. It is also – however – a completely amoral device. It is not of itself a good – even though good can come from it. For the benefits that can accrue thereby to be put to good purpose – the advance of society as a whole and the elimination of those evils of deprivation – lack of education – poor living standards – low life expectancy and unfulfilled promise – it is essential that the tool be managed, purposed, regulated and generally focused on the overall good. The market cannot achieve these aims unassisted.

Those who insist on the market being given its head – on its being allowed to exercise untrammeled influence on all areas of society – are in effect proposing an order entirely free from moral compass. This way madness lies. Events demonstrate time and time again that venality and criminality are not confined to the ‘lower orders’. When the powerful succumb to corruption they frequently do so absolutely. Human nature being what it is, the mere accumulation of wealth is no guarantee of altruistic or even acceptable behaviour.

By way of justification of their imperfect belief system those on the right may point to the fact that – in a period in which the rich have become the mega-rich, then the hyper-rich and ultimately the ultra-rich – living standards of those at the bottom of the pile have also risen marginally. It matters not – they protest – that the 1% own an ever increasing percentage of global wealth – just as long as everybody else’s living standards have also crept up.

Well – they are wrong… and it is just not good enough!

History teaches us that the the ultimate outcome of ever increasing inequality is revolution. That the West has not in recent decades experienced a greater degree of rebellious unrest can be attributed to three facts:

• living standards for even the poorest segment are higher than they once were
• in a globalised economy it is considerably more difficult to identify and locate the guilty parties
• many in the West subscribe to the lottery mentality, by which – however long the odds – they still believe that they can hit the ‘wealth’ jackpot and join the 1%

The bad news for the ultra-rich is that it is all just a matter of degree. We don’t yet know where the tipping point will be, but be it will.

And at that point things will turn nasty!

OK – enough of this now…