Home
Previous letters
Subscribe
Useful links
About me
Contact me
|
WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 565
View full list of previous letters
Receive future letters by email
WCL 565 July 2007
Wealth and democracy
There are said to be four million millionaires in the United States and they are represented in Congress by more or less 100% of the law-makers. Which is a pretty fair summing-up of the situation regarding the respective weight of wealth and democracy in America. It would perhaps be even more illuminating to know how many representatives of the one million U.S. billionaires also sit in Congress.
The Land of the Almighty Dollar lives up to the name coined for it well over a century ago; and one might think there was no harm attached to that. After all, if human progress continues, we might expect that at some future time the wealth accumulated would enable the entire human population to enjoy the tangible benefits of material wealth to be available to all. But clearly we are very far from that affluent situation in the world as a whole.
World citizens, in fact, will look askance at a situation where our advance to wealth and prosperity has left the great majority, even in America, languishing long behind. True, the majority of American citizens seem content with a lottery in life stacked so heavily against newcomers to the feat. That in itself is a poor argument. Even slaves have professed themselves well content with the crusts and water when delivered without whips and beatings. Nor are the poverty-stricken likely to be the people most equipped to judge what is best for a society in which they are excluded from most of the benefits.
There are bigger arguments against plutocracy than its undemocratic failings. Inequity and bias are no basis for a healthy society. World citizens believe that as we are all equal in our humanity, so we are in our rights. They may be obscured or even neglected by our own failure to take them seriously, but nevertheless they are quite fundamental to the health of human societies everywhere. The subjects of empires all suffer, whether as bosses or workers, slave-owners or slaves.
The Marxist interpretation of American society and the prophecies of its collapse have been confounded for over a century and a half. But the vigour and intensity of witch-hunts for Communist subversion and left-wing sympathisers give an indication of the real fear that is engendered in the minds of the politically-aware plutocrats. They know that if the American people should doubt the value of an unfair lottery system, they could decide to abolish it. How many billionaires would then retain their wealth?
But America is the world leader, not in democracy, but in the propaganda for the American Way of Life as a democratic paradise. For the majority it has offered and delivered lives of astonishing comfort and wealth compared to the average of human possessions now and in the past. But it does if often at the expense of millions of deprived people living in less favoured parts of the world, under tyrannies upheld by U.S. money and military power. That will prove vulnerable – the Achilles heel of the great American colossus.
John Roberts
Comment on this letter
View full list of previous letters
Receive future letters by email
Comments on this letter
|
|