To learn more about how systemic racism is baked into the Economy, the L4J community read and discussed an article entitled Why do we allow infinite wealth accumulation?
Perhaps because we have glorified it to the Nth degree in our world. You know how we look at hoarders of things, food, trash, memorabilia, etc? We refer to them as troubled, mentally ill, stuck. Yet when Jay Leno shows off his 150 car collection, we think it’s cool. There is so much to unpack here but I’ll simply share some of the passages from the article that spoke to us most.
[Pictured: Jay Leno owns 150 cars and one of them is valued at $12 million.]
To read Joe Biden’s plan to tax billionaires this morning was so on time. It gave me hope. And yet many will call him crazy. “How we get in the way of one’s earning potential?” Well, read on and see if your thinking about the “rights” of billionaires to hoard wealth shifts just a little. Just a little…
If someone earned $100 per hour — more than enough for anyone to live in luxurious comfort — in order to truly earn a billion dollars, they’d have to work 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for five thousand years. So how is a billion dollars actually amassed? By skimming a profit off the backs of untold others:
* off the workers they employ
* off the suppliers they squeeze
* off the carcasses of the competitors they destroy with monopoly
* off the planet they unsustainably extract from
* off the governments from which they gain subsidies and advantages
The solution is frightfully simple. It’s a radical idea that will be common sense to future generations: Individual private wealth must be limited. That’s right: No more billionaires. Every dollar over $1 billion in net worth will be taxed at 100% or placed in a commons trust. As one Redditor put it: Once you reach $999,999,999 we give you a plaque that says, “congratulations, you won capitalism,” and we name a dog park after you.
We need to move quickly. In seven minutes, the world’s billionaires gained $62 million while sixty people moved into slums and thirty children died of hunger.
How many more people must suffer and die before we re-structure the global economy for widest-spread wellbeing?
Feel any shifts yet? #folamionthefuture#listening4justice#endwealthhoarding
