Saturday 25 March 2017

One path to wealth equality

"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist."
-Archbishop Hélder Câmara

The answer to why the poor are poor is that the poor are a critical ingredient for a capitalist society to exist. There must a large pool of unemployed labourers who haven't the means to provide for themselves willing to sell their labour to capitalists. The capitalists in turn derive surplus value (profit) through paying the workers less than the value of labour that the workers provide. The capitalists (from their perspective) would ideally pay the workers the bare minimum needed to survive. Fortunately for the workers, the government intervenes with policies such as the minimum wage and employment insurance. The capitalists certain appreciate it then, when groups such as the church provide money for the poor, because it gets the capitalists off the hook for providing welfare through their taxes, so they can get away more easily with hiding their money in offshore tax havens.

To keep the pool of unemployed large, capitalist countries must have either a positive population growth rate, or very limited upward mobility for the poor. Upward mobility is a negative issue for the system and the capitalists, because if the children of the those who precariously lived in the labour pool go on to become rentiers, then they need to be replaced by more landless labourers (or they cannot easily collect rents). The system is happy for people to be downwardly mobile, such as in the case of the middle class getting crushed down into the lower class.

Here is a way, in theory, of how to restore some balance by arranging that the process of the rich getting richer and the poor poorer at least be temporarily halted by a reset. The first method is to reset everyone's bank account to the same value (could be zero, but $1000 each would allow for spending on basic necessities). The second is to redistribute the land more equitably, and to resolve the socially parasitic drain of absentee land owners. This could be done by reassigning any second properties to a government agency, who would expropriate the properties and redistribute them. In the case that those second properties are rented out to tenants, it might make sense to simply assign those current renters as the new owners. Because both the accounts and the land registry are saved in computers, two algorithms, which could be used to insert codes at the appropriate places (all banks and all land registries) would look this:

A) Bank Account Reset Algorithm (Set everyone's balance to $1000).

While (AccountNumber <= TotalAccounts) {
    AccountNumber.setBalanceValue (1000);
    }

B) Land Registry Reset Algorithm (Assigns ownership to government agency, or current tenants if it's rented).

Flag RegistryNumber.Owner(multiple properties);

While (FlaggedRegistryNumber <= TotalFlaggedRegistries) {
    if FlaggedRegistryNumber = rented
          FlaggedRegistryNumber.setOwner (CurrentTenants);
    else
    FlaggedRegistryNumber.setOwner (GovernmentAgency);
   }

The purpose of the above code samples is merely to show that there are ways to bring about more equality, that the fundamental systems can indeed be changed. Where there's a will, there's a way.