How does a rich person existing affect me? Is it just because I'm jealous that I don't have a yacht and so I should try to overthrow the system that doesn't let me have a yacht? Even though I'll never get a yacht in any system?
Can we look at the graph of wealth disparity of America versus other nations?
Extremely rich people control every aspect of your life, how your city is planned, the state of the job market, the state of the economy, the laws, the state of the planet itself. One way that got a lot of attention lately is that extremely rich people prevent access to health care for everyone else.
Nobody has that much control. Human systems evolve from many different interests and lots of unforseen consequences. How are the extremely rich preventing access to health care for everyone else? The US is a democracy, people do vote and have a say in what they want their representatives to do. If universal healthcare was the priority for a majority of voters over time, it would have happened.
Don't be naive. Try to look at everything throught he lens that considers money is speech and corporations are people, and that the flow of wealth always, without exeception, flows from the poorest to the richest, and you will understand why it's a fallacy to think there is any good will involved, or that the ultra-wealthy are going to let you or I, the peasants, fuck up their plans.
Because the existence of these people means that we concentrate economic resources toward building yachts that might otherwise be concentrated toward growing food or building homes.
Rational economic actors who produce goods and/or services will tend to supply what there is the most economic demand for (what brings them the most profit). If half the population has almost none of the money, then their needs have little economic demand behind them. So then what is the economic incentive to supply them with the things they need?
In other words, producing a hundred-million-dollar yacht is a hundred million dollars (less profit margin) that could have been invested toward a more collective good, thus increasing the supply of those goods, thus reducing their scarcity, thus reducing their price.
> Before accounting for taxes and transfers, the U.S. ranked 10th in income inequality; among the countries with more unequal income distributions were France, the U.K. and Ireland. But after taking taxes and transfers into account, the U.S. had the second-highest level of inequality, behind only Chile. (Mexico and Brazil had higher after-tax/transfer Gini scores, but no “before” scores with which to compare them; including them would push the U.S. down to fourth place.)
A rich person certainly does not. Rich people as a collective class, however? You're kidding yourself if you claim that the people who make the laws and run our institutions aren't a nearly exclusive subset of the rich class.
Nevertheless, distributed power certainly is less dangerous than concentrated power, isn't it? Inequality is a metric of the overall concentration of such power in our free market society. More inequality means more power in the hands of fewer. They become more like kings each day, when does it stop?
Because of the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States, money is speech. Therefore the more money you have, the more speech you have, and the more speech you have the more loudly your voice is heard. The more money you have, the more political influence you have. Because of the Citizens United decision, the politicians are no longer beholden to the will of the voters, but to the will of the donors. The Supreme Court is not supposed to make law, that is the providence of the Congress, but here they made law. Money is speech and corporations are people. If you can't match their donations, you shut sit down and shut the fuck up because you do not count anymore with your pithy vote an no money to donate.
Can we look at the graph of wealth disparity of America versus other nations?