by Brian T. Lynch
The New York Times recently asked each of the Democratic primary candidates for President a series of identical questions. The last
question on their list was, “Does anyone deserve to have a billion dollars?”
The trivial framing of that question bypassed the grave
urgency for asking it in the first place. In a variant form of the question the
Times was essentially asking, “Isn’t it OK to be a billionaire if you played by
the rules and worked hard to earn it?”
The wording of the question pre-supposes that the laws and social
rules in place, by which a person may accumulate a billion-dollars, are fair
and open to anyone. It ignores whether inherited wealth is also deserved. Most importantly, it treats wealth as if it is
only a money count and not a measure of privilege and social power. By doing so,
the question as it was posed ignored the essential problem that extreme private
wealth is toxic to human society regardless of a person’s character or how they
obtained it.
A more salient question would have been, “How many more billionaires
can this human society sustain before it collapses?
In the 50,000-year history of human civilization, the concepts
of private ownership and private wealth are recent developments. The full ramifications
of these constructs on our social cohesion and collective welfare are still
being revealed. The written history of civilizations offers no comfort. There
are no examples of a happy, stable society where extremes of wealth inequality existed.
The lessons of history seem to be that a suitable balance of power is required
to sustain a healthy and stable society. Human populations simply cannot tolerate
distributions of wealth/power that either force unnatural equality or permit
unlimited extremes of private wealth.
There is no question that we crossed the Rubicon into a
world where extreme wealth inequality is corrupting world governments and
destroying the balance of nature. The questions we should be asking candidates
for President and all our elected officials are, “What are your plans to rebalance
the distribution of wealth and social power in America?" And then the follow-up question, “What
are you going to do to stabilize and rebalance the Earth’s damaged ecology?”
