By Joe Jarvis
How many successful people can there be? It seems like, after every article you read these days, the author bio talks about a book they have written, an invention they created, a prestigious award or some other indicator of great success. Yet I’ve never really heard of most of them.
I used to get pangs of jealousy when I would see descriptions like that of successful people; it almost felt like there were a limited number of “success” spots on planet earth, and if they were taking one up, it made it that much less likely for me to get one.
But it’s not true. There is no limit to the number of successful people that can exist, especially since everyone has a slightly different idea of success.
And in the same vein, there is no limit to how many wealthy people there can be. Wealth is not a zero-sum game, there is not some amount of wealth out there that once it is grabbed, is gone. Anyone can create wealth. Growing a garden is a great place to start creating the necessities to live and giving yourself a little food shortage insurance plan.
When people say the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, that is a huge misrepresentation of what is really happening, even if the rich have far more compared to the poor.
For example, let’s use the amount of healthy food that can be purchased as an indicator of wealth. If a “poor” person could once only afford 10 pounds of healthy food per week, and a “rich” person could afford 100 pounds, the rich person is ten times richer than the poor person. But now suppose a poor person can afford 100 pounds of healthy food per week, and a rich person can afford 2,000 pounds.
True, the wealth gap has doubled from 1-10 to 1-20, yet the poor person is living as richly as only the wealthy could in years past.
This is the true nature of the wealth gap. Almost everyone is better off these days. The gap doesn’t matter as much as the minimum standard of living.
The classic example which always comes to mind for me is of President Calvin Coolidge who lived in the White House fewer than 100 years ago. One of the most powerful people on Earth watched helplessly as his son died of an infected blister from playing tennis.
In that sense, everyone living in America today has a higher standard of living than the President and his family had 90 years ago. Advancements in medicine, technology, information, and production have risen the standard of living for everyone.
This chart shows the exponential nature in which people are being lifted out of poverty.
Poverty has not yet been entirely eradicated, but at this pace, as long as those in power don’t thrust the world back into the Dark Ages, it is only a matter of time until Earth is basically free from poverty.
And at that point, when all needs are being met, what does it matter if the richest person has 10, 50, or a thousand times more wealth than the poorest?
Options and a Backup Plan = Freedom
There was a time when the options for a person to create enough wealth to live were very few.
Do you want to live in a one-room dusty, dirty, festering farmhouse and work the fields for 14 hours a day to scrape by in grinding poverty? Or do you want to live in a crowded apartment, and work in a dingy, smoky, stuffy factory for 14 hours a day and scrape by in regular poverty?
Not a great choice to have to make. Today that conundrum is disappearing from almost all lives on Earth. If the trend of eradicating poverty continues, it shouldn’t be long until everyone on Earth has a better option to create wealth.
But, unfortunately, governments and their crony deals with corporations are standing in the way of the quickest progress. They keep destroying the wealth in wars and misallocation of resources that would otherwise be spread through the ranks of the people.
The Richest Man in Babylon ($5.38)
A great place to start would be to actually allow people to keep the products of their own labor, instead of taxing it away, or writing laws and regulations which make it all but impossible to survive without bowing down to the corporate overlords.
This, of course, means respecting the honestly acquired wealth of the richest as well as the poorest. You can’t support the poor being freed to get ahead while simultaneously calling on the rich to be robbed to even things out.
Governments and corporations have indeed set up the world to make it hard to get ahead, and true justice would involve them paying damages to those they have wronged. But don’t believe that government power can be used to solve the problem that they created.
Joe Jarvis writes for The Daily Bell, where this article first appeared.
I was very successful today. Got up at 6:30, took a shower, shaved, ate breakfast while I blogged awhile, rode 54 miles to my chiropractor on my 250 Honda Rebel motorcycle, then returned the long way home putting on a total 140 miles in 100 degree weather without any problems. And I am 75 years old :-))
Impressive! What makes that truly badass is that it was a trip to the chiropractor.
Thanks. Yeah, like a tuneup on an old Mustang. Guy is a brilliant healer. I was a medic in the Army and when I got out I worked at a county hospital as an orderly. I ‘floated’ which means I could be placed wherever I was needed…ER, Post Op, Geriatrics, etc.
I used to get a similar “story” from the old folks in Geriatrics…
“If I knew I was going to live so long I would have taken better care of myself.”
Bingo, I ‘got’ it and became a runner, vegetarian, and simply took good care of myself. It has paid off on the non genetic issues. It is said that if your body could hold an election, would you still be in charge? :-))
This reads like propaganda for continued control of western nations by the racist pharisee bankers. What is important is not absolute levels of “wealth” but independence from coercion by the “wealthy”. The perversions we confront are very old. Remember that Plato said that a maximum difference of four-fold between the rich and poor was what society should aim for.
A world dependent of the decisions of a few and not able to clothe, shelter and feed themselves are at the will of those that create and control the means of exchange for all of us, a situation that should have never existed and, by the ignorance of the majority, has corrupted and now controls all of humanity. This is the greatest level of arrogance and mass stupidity in the history of man. Along with this, an agenda only a depraved mad man could love is being shoved down all of our senses. Merchant law (Law of the Sea), is an unconscionable contract that no reasonable man would ever agree to if informed, yet that is the reality of the “one law – one world” order is made of. This “rule” of law is not lawful nor would it be binding in a court of the informed. All debts are of inequitable trade and therefore are against the law of the land, that of which the people of each independent community/city or state, not the corporate admiralty (crown or absolute ruler) decide them to be. The enforcers of such “laws” as are imposed on us all today are as corrupt at the top as those that make the laws and credit (actual value of money does not exist nor is their any viable backing that the reasonable man can understand thus gold and silver are not viable options as it’s true value is that of it’s industrial use not contrived demand – also not that throughout history, gold and silver have never stopped panics or depressions). The entire system is a sham as “money” can be made in stock and committees regardless of the direction of price and is so centralized as to be have been shown to be subject of collusion for some time. The best option is to instate the law of the land and break down “superstates” into informed communities that form relationships for the larger needs of the people of municipal agreements of trade. To be dragged along into the “future” at the whims of true global tyrants is not an acceptable option for a free and informed people. The US/UK and “democracies” like them are as perverted as those they replaced.
The current day pharisees could not exist without their enforcers, policy makers and other paid stooges. This group exists, not only throughout many religions, but their masonic counterparts around the world. When faith is used to profit a handful, it is a fraud as well as those that would have us believe it and enforce their rules. The masonic war against the religions and monarchs is an absolute failure with far worse consequences than what came before them as their “revolutions” beginning with the American Revolution, are all manufactured with those that believe in them, participants in global genocides, as the indigenous peoples throughout the “new” world, Jacobin, Bolshevik, Young Turk, Maoist, 2 World Wars, numerous over and covert subversive regime changes, color revolutions…. These revolution in turn feed other genocides to nation states in close proximity as did the Soviets, Maoists, Americans, Ottomans. The UK is the center as this is where the creation and management of global credit ascended from. As these people profited from unrestrained increased population, so to do they profit from our slaughter. The obsequious and clandestine operations from these groups declaring freedom at the end of a gun has been in operation for several centuries and performing at a global scale from at least the late 1500 as the creation of the Levant Company, later to become the East India Company and other self serving lovers of wealth, power, access and control groups since the 1400s coming out of Portugal, Spain and Italy. The competing powers out of Judea and Rome appear to have become one, neither having a good conscience, good faith, good will, good fruit and rotten to the core.
Hmmm
Using a 90 year time frame things look OK. However, if you shrink that time from to say 1970 and anytime forward from that date until today the equation turns very dark in deed for the average American.
But take heart people, compared to say the 2100 years ago, the average man is living like a king! wait a minute, is he really any more “free” from the oppression and tyranny of government and the evil tyrants that control them? I think we all know the answer to that one. After all, is getting killed for by cancers and diseases spread due to the greed and corruption for lack of affordable healthcare, or death from an unseen drone, or the bullet of a government gun on the street in you home town really any different in the end to being fed to the lions…..And back in the day common folk did not own land. Is that any different that today in America where if you fail to pay a yearly tribute to the government they take “their” house and their lands back?