Why Asking for Some of It Back Won’t Work
Jesus is recorded as saying the poor will be with you always. It may have been his politic way of saying the money changers will be with you always, that is, the rich, who create the poor. This has turned out to be true.
Our pox today is how monstrous large the discrepancy between poor and rich has become. The swollen economies of the 21st century host individuals of enormous wealth commanding sprawling business empires that threaten whole economies as well as the ecosystems on which entire populations rely. Within electricity grids, M.V. Ramana1 remarked that no one unit should produce over 10% to 15% of total capacity. Too high a dependence on any single unit would threaten the entire grid. Experts know this. Should they detect such disproportions, they adjust the system to restore balance.
Likewise with economies. Inordinate concentrations of wealth upset the balance, not just of the system, but of the societies and bodies politic that endure such pathological accretion. It is happening now, and we are in imminent danger of toppling. Not incidentally, we are also the target of a massive propaganda campaign the wealthy are waging to deny it all.
According to them, half the world’s wealth rightfully belongs to the few individuals who fought their way out of the morass of human sloth from which they seized it: them. To paraphrase Willie Loman’s brother Ben, “I walked into the jungle and when I walked out, by God, I was rich.”2 Rather than threaten civilizations, the wealthy are its visionaries, engines of productivity, sources of employment, catalysts of industry, not hoarders but creators of wealth. Without them, we would still be in the morass they led us out of, benighted, hopeless, doomed.
They believe that, and it’s our fault. In letting them get so rich in the first place, we allowed them to really think all that wealth is theirs. They want us thinking it, too.
Sadly, to balance the dysfunctional wealth distribution, the imagination has ranged no further than taxing the rich. But that proposal cannot work. It was the system that got them rich. They’ve fine-tuned it in the meantime to shunt ever more wealth their way and through that system will get their money back with maneuvers that will amaze us. Worse, taxing them is nothing more than our humble request to have some of it back, which reinforces the myth that the wealth, in fact, belongs to them.
It is the system, however, not the people, that is at fault. People do not change. There will always be those keen to find the weak spot in a system, exploit it, pride themselves on their “workaround,” and for being clever enough to get away with it, consider their act not only justified, but a lesson to others to keep their heads up.
No, we cannot change the people. But we can change the system. David Hemenway3 points out “a fundamental law of economics and of psychology – if you don’t want people to do something, make it harder. If you want them to do it more, make it easier.” He was talking about something critically important: reducing gun deaths in the United States. Making it more difficult for criminals to get guns, he maintains, is an effective deterrent. In the present case, rather than try to pluck back some of what we allowed the rich to claim as theirs, we must adjust the system to prevent individuals from ever accumulating so much.
Unfortunately, changing the system is not just tricky, it’s dangerous. Over the decades, the wealthy have manipulated it to protect their vast properties. With that property, they also acquired the single tool they need to ward off future assaults: the wealth itself. Tactics in their portfolio include legislative, judicial, and electoral interference as well as propaganda. The last, tampering with public opinion, is the most serious as it poisons the well.
A perverted standoff obtains today. Due to the system’s inflexible commitment to honor property rights, entire governments are bound to respect the territory of those few who have claimed stake to half the world. Any demand for a fair share is treated as an attack on the rich and, oddly, on the system itself. In the 21st century, it is the master who is abused when the slave demands food, not because slaves are any longer the master’s property, but because the bread they live by is. Free at last, let them forage for their own grain when all fields belong to the wealthy.
Nevertheless, it is this system we need to change, a formidable task. We struggle within a legal framework established by the wealthy for the wealthy, which formalizes labor not as a Thou but an It, not as a soul but “my horse, my ox, my ass, my anything,” as Petruchio declares in taming the shrew. Labor remains shut out from the mighty halls of decision, not slaves, but property nonetheless, an expense on the balance sheet, a liability.
As long as this relationship persists, labor will be reduced to doing the only thing it can do when its request for better conditions is denied: strike. However, contrary to UAW President Shawn Fain’s remarks made during the standoff with the Detroit Three, strikes do not demonstrate labor’s power, but its weakness.
The moment labor strikes, it loses. In taking the low ground, it sacrifices any semblance of sovereignty or parity with the company. It has, in fact, thrown a tantrum like a naughty child because it did not get what it wanted. That’s how it looks to the public. And no matter how prosperous a company might be, it is the workers who appear to be unreasonable because of the tantrum effect. Besides being messy and expensive, strikes never solve the problem.
In 2009, at the companies’ behest, UAW workers forfeited cost-of-living adjustments to keep the giant auto manufacturers solvent. In 2023, after a half-year of record prosperity, workers quite reasonably requested the companies to reinstate COLA as well as improve working conditions and increase wages. The companies refused. Labor went on strike. Companies exploited the publicity to announce to the world what it has been announcing throughout history: give a deluded labor force what it wants ant it will ruin business.
The corporate propaganda machine does not stop there. It churns out sophisticated slander to seduce the public at large: Workers are greedy. They won’t be satisfied until they bankrupt their benefactors. They are Marxist slobs who want to take over the thriving, robust businesses the rich worked so hard to establish. They are envious. They are nonstarters. They are freeloaders. They are Socialists who want to bring down democracy. They are coming for you next.
If the conflict persists and labor holds out, attacks follow. Frank H. Little, IWW labor leader representing miners, and Walter Reuther, who rose to be president of UAW, were both beaten badly several times. Little was beaten unconsciousness at least once. Courageous and committed, they kept fighting for their workers. Little was lynched in 1917. Reuther died in a suspicious plane crash in 1970.
It is known that the Detroit Three made record profits – not revenue – profits of $21 billion in the first half of 2023. President Joe Biden said during his brief stint on the picket line: The auto industry is “doing incredibly well, and guess what? You should be doing incredibly well, too.”
That is exactly what’s missing in the equation. There should be no arguments each time. There should be no dispute over what a fair wage is or what workers require to live a decent life. The cycle of request, denial, tantrum has to be put aside. The parent-child relationship must replaced with a relationship between equals. When contracts are negotiated, labor must be correctly recognized not as an expense but a participant, not as an ass but an engine of industry, not as someone taking handouts but a partner.
To make this possible, we must adopt a simple, painful precept: limit the profits corporations and individuals can claim as their own. No egomaniac will be willing to sacrifice heaven and earth — as they do now — to squeeze out as much as they can if they know they won’t be keeping it. When they realize that what they grab will instead be going to the workers, the community, the infrastructure, the environment, that is to say, in equal and fair measure to the true sources and producers of that wealth, they might back off. Forced to view their entrepreneurial kingdoms not as mine but ours, their fervor for personal riches just might cool, but in any case, those riches will now be out of their reach. This is necessary if we are to establish a system that keeps us all equal enough.
- M.V. Ramana, professor at the “School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia,” spoke with Ralph Nader August 19, 2023, on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. ↩︎
- Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. ↩︎
- David Hemenway is an economist, Professor of Health Policy at Harvard University, and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center. He is a former Nader’s Raider and is the author of Private Guns, Public Health and While We Were Sleeping: Success Stories in Injury and Violence Prevention. He spoke with Ralph Nader September 16, 2023, on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. ↩︎