Within a few hours of the news that some of the world’s wealthiest people had pledged a combined billion dollars plus to repair the recently fire-ravaged Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris came the caterwauling complaints of moral outrage from the philanthropically pious who chastised the billionaire donors for not being as quick or as generous to aid the world’s impoverished populations.
The scolds soon expanded their rebuke to include the issue of wealth-disparity, corrupt capitalism and a general censure of anyone who has great wealth — the implication being that the rich unfairly benefit from a skewed economic system, are insulated from life’s harsh realities and are insufficiently empathetic to those who face those realities.
Rebuilding Notre-Dame, they moralized, is far less critical than addressing world poverty, which they contend results from the unconscionably disparate distribution of global wealth that grossly enriches the “let them eat cake” economic aristocracy.
With so few having so much while so many have so little, it is easy to be judgmental of the few and the system that allows them to become so disproportionately wealthy. Nevertheless, sitting astride a moral high horse and shooting arrows of accusation at rich folks for spending their money as they see fit, rather than how you see fit, reveals more sanctimonious presumption than reasoned evaluation.
If rebuilding Notre-Dame is immoral misspending by the rich, then so, too, was their spending on the Getty, Guggenheim and other great museums; so, too, is their spending to preserve the ancient Colosseum in Rome and other historical structures.
Like Notre-Dame, these are all monuments to beauty, human endeavor and triumph. They unite people in shared inspiration, admiration and wonder. They maintain tangible human history and promote and demonstrate humanity’s creative imagination, skill and aspiration for the sublime. They are worth having and maintaining.
There are nearly 8 billion people on earth now, but only one Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. And, as long as humans continue to breed beyond the carrying capacity of our finite planet, poverty will only become more severe and pervasive, defying remedy.
If all the wealth of the world’s 2,208 billionaires were redistributed to the world’s 4.3 billion impoverished people, each of them would receive a one-time stipend of $2,116. Or, if the combined annual incomes of all these billionaires were redistributed to the world’s poor, each indigent would receive about $300 per year.
Even if the combined wealth of every person on earth who is worth more than $1 million was redistributed to the world’s poor, it would amount to a one-time boon of $31,395 per person. Redistributing the annual income of all the world’s economic elite would yield $3,850 per person per year.
Clearly, confiscating and redistributing wealth or income would not eliminate world poverty — but, it would make everyone equally poor.
While it is true that the forces of greed — whether Russia’s predatory plutocrats or America’s cannibal capitalists — plunder their nations’ wealth without regard to the millions of people they exploit or to the environments they despoil, the presumption that the wealthy are all undeserving beneficiaries of a rigged economic system, living in cloistered comfort, oblivious to the everyday struggles of their less fortunate fellow transient tenants on this planet is far from valid.
First of all, acquiring substantial wealth is not invariably the result of unethical behavior, congenital advantage or rapacious greed — a truth that new millionaire Bernie Sanders is now wrestling with.
Being rich doesn’t mean one must be a criminal any more than being poor means one must be a saint.
Is a poor person who wins a $768 million lottery suddenly suspect? Most often, being rich means one has a marketable talent or product that is in high demand. As a chagrined Sanders tersely explains it, “write a best seller”.
Second, all rich people aren’t smugly selfish. Many of the world’s wealthiest people — past and present — have given huge portions of their wealth to benefit the general welfare, including endowments to universities, scholarship funds, medical research, hospitals, journalism, the arts, and aid to the destitute and ill. Some question their motives, but the benefits of their philanthropy are, nonetheless, undeniable.
The Giving Pledge, a campaign initiated in 2010 by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates — two of the world’s uber-rich and most generous philanthropists — encourages the world’s billionaires to give away the majority of their wealth during their lives, or after their deaths, to benefit the public good.
History demonstrates that regardless of how an economic system is organized there are always the very wealthy, the very poor and those in between. It also shows us that when wealth disparity becomes too pronounced and pervasive, with fewer folks in between and more becoming poor, there is social upheaval — often violent.
It is prudent, then, for a society to adjust its economic system before the impoverished majority starts sharpening the guillotines’ blades.
While some of the wealthy will argue that it is not their responsibility to mitigate poverty or ensure that the economic system provides fair opportunity for all, it would be wise for them to join in the effort, and some, like Ray Dalio have.
Few things are as destructively dangerous as insatiable greed, and we have much too much of that in America — which now has the most pronounced wealth disparity in the entire developed world because it has perverted capitalism to favor the few at the expense of the many.
— Randy Alcorn is a Santa Barbara political observer. Contact him at randyaalcorn@gmail.com, or click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.