Excessive wealth is a symptom of an economic system that drains wealth from everybody else, because the biggest companies have enough power to exploit employees, suppliers, customers, governments and the environment. These people have not ‘earned’ their wealth. They became rich because they understand how the system is rigged.
By Rod Driver
Global Research, March 29, 2021
David Rothkopfwrote a book aboutthe world’s richest people called Superclass. In it he noted that 161 people control $23 trillion, and that the incomes of the top 25 hedge fund managers are approximately $800 million per year each.(1) Other writers discuss the richest 0.1% of the population, who have incomes of over $2million per year in the US.(2)
They have coined the term Excessive Wealth Disorder to explain that when some people are too rich, this creates big downsides for many other people, and for society in general. This post discusses some of those downsides.
This postshould ideally be read in conjunction with earlier posts that explain that excessive wealth is extracted by controlling an industry, receiving many types of unearned income (known as rent-seeking) and all manner of unethical, fraudulent or criminal activity.Excessive wealth is a symptom…
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The Most Revolutionary Act 
Brilliant condensed analysis of the mechanism of poverty caused by wealth.
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I was also really impressed by the article, con.
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I read the article asking myself how the world has become so unbalanced. By no means wealthy, I have been a property owner for over half my life, having bought and sold three homes over the years. I now live on inherited family property, and it is way more trouble than it’s worth, what with maintenance, taxes, hurricanes, floods, and the fact that development has moved ever closer. The military’s Army- Air Force base flies its planes and helicopters over my head, on the way to its world-wide wars. I have to listen to the Baby Barbarians murdering clay pigeons at the Gun Club down the street. I have to listen to the traffic noise headed to and from International Paper’s real estate development on its former tree farm on Skidaway Island, complete with its three taxpayer-funded bridges across the intracoastal waterway. And I have to listen to Wal-Mart’s street sweeper in the middle of the night, because the county wants new taxpayers without any concern for the long-term taxpayers who obtained their properties long before the county changed the zoning to allow for commercial mega-business in a formerly rural area.
People think they own stuff, but their stuff owns them. I think of the Yamacraw Indian Tomochichi who befriended James Edward Oglethorpe when he arrived in Savannah on a king’s grant to establish a buffer town between Charleston, SC, and the Spanish settlements in Florida. When Tomochichi visited London, he was astounded at all the “fixed dwellings.”
I agree with him. I’d like to divest myself of materiality before I die, but all the stuff accumulated by generations has nowhere to go, so it gets underfoot, collects mold and insects, and is constantly breaking down or in need of repair.
We are seeing “Government over the people,” and the governments are riding high. The wealthy couldn’t have accumulated what they have without a lot of government help.
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Katherine, I can’t help imagining how things might have been different if the women’s equality movement of the Middle Ages hadn’t been destroyed by the witchcraft trials.
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