As a kid, there used to be commercials on TV in Australia for "dollar a day" charity sponsorship of starving children in Ethiopia, though I am not sure those commercials still exist. I have always had a mixed relationship with charities, because I think we should have set up society in a way not to rely on the donations of individuals to keep the system going. And also, because there tends to be a hue misappropriation of funds, from warlords taking the benefits, to administration costs eating over 90% of the donations. Yet, there are still some charities out there that are trying and may even be succeeding in doing some good, but overall, it is an inefficient process.
When I say that we shouldn't need charity, it is because most of what we spend our resources on isn't necessary for really anyone and the vast amounts of wealth that are being generated, go to making more wealth from non-value-adding activity for humans. For instance, there are 3,028 billionaires in the world. One billion dollars is "a dollar a day" for 2,739,726 children. That is to say that if each of them gave ~330K, that many children would apparently be saved from starvation and have a better life. However, taxing the rich is not the answer, as that is just more forced charity.
The thing is that while we might look at the extremely wealthy and their billions, in order to have that amount of value, there is a consumer machine that is churning trillions upon trillions, and the majority of that trade is rather useless for humanity. It is largely consumer goods and services that are designed to entertain and then be disposed of rapidly. And the majority of the supply chain from the design of the machines to work the mines, to the information management systems that facilitate administration and the practical people to make it all happen, are in service to these disposable, useless, industries.
Yet, we can no longer imagine a world without all this crap, where we have a belief that we are doing better for having it. We convince ourselves that what we do in life is important, even though nearly all of us are just part of that same consumer machine in the jobs we do, the things we buy, and the behaviours we keep. This means that a lack of resources are not the problem, nor is there a lack of wealth. What there is however, is a lack of importance placed on the things that actually matter to our existence, subsistence, and wellbeing.
Of course though, there is a balance point somewhere that tells us as humans that we can't just do everything in service to resource efficiency, we also have to have "a good time" too, otherwise life becomes meaningless. Yet, that line is far from balanced today, where the things of importance to our survival, are being replaced by the irrelevancies for consumption.
This makes economic sense.
Because taking people's minds off of important things makes far more money than focusing their attention on what needs to be done, because what needs to be done is more difficult than feigning ignorance and avoiding the hardship of responsibility and the work required for positive change. Which takes us back to the economic machinery that churns trillions to make an increasingly smaller portion of society, wealthier, while the rest fall further and further behind.
Just like many of those African countries were stripped of resources by colonialism, the world population is being stripped by corporate globalism. We are all being mined, but instead of just oil and diamonds, it is of our humanity itself, where we are increasingly being disconnected and separated from each other, to become isolated and oppressed. Our health is fading, our mind is fading. The only thing not fading away, is our waist.
And our waste.
If we could break down the average life by consumer behaviour based on country, and factor in the entire supply chain, I wonder what portion would be considered positive for humanity, or negative for humanity. I would assume that for most people, including myself, far more would fall into the negative bucket than we would like to admit. Still, we aren't going to change are we, because we have bought into this notion that being entertained is the most important thing we can do with our time.
At the moment, governments the world over are providing charity to corporations through tax loopholes. Rather than looking to "tax the rich" (or anyone more), the first order should be to close the major loophole and have corporations pay the tax on what they have earned, where it was earned. None of this moving it to another country for a lower tax rate, none of these P.O. Box head offices. Yet - they keep avoiding this, because the disruption and change in society is immense.
The stock market as we know it today collapses.
Evaluations are made on earnings, and "earnings" are inflated through these tax loopholes, which can see a corporation strip wealth from people in a country, and pay nothing into building the infrastructure required for that same country. The big corporations are the clearest examples, but all corporations are doing it. This gives them overinflated ratings, subsided by the populations of countries they are stripping. It also makes it infinitely harder for local small and medium enterprises that are paying their taxes locally, to compete.
This would significantly decrease the profit margins of corporations, meaning their evaluations would fall and so would their profit distribution to shareholders. The ROI on all of the largest companies in the world would collapse, and that means that people would shift their investments to where profit is highest, or more stable - elsewhere.
Tax doesn't disappear overnight, so there is not going to be some flip the switch change to a no tax system in our lifetimes, but major overhauls are required to start shifting the distribution of wealth to not only more people, but to more important areas of society. We need to reallocate resources, but it has to be done through economic incentive, otherwise, it isn't going to happen.
Tax makes the world go round.
But as the majority, we need to pushback on this forced charity where we are constantly subsidising corporations to mint more billionaires, while more people fall into needing the charity of strangers. To rebuild our local communities, we have to ensure that more financial resources are applied locally to improve conditions for an increasing amount of people. To do this, we don't need to tax billionaires, we need to close the financial loopholes that helped them become billionaires in the first place. And of course, it wouldn't hurt to spend locally on what is important, than globally on what is not.
A dollar a day is irrelevant, in a healthy economy.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
Be part of the Hive discussion.
And you may be rewarded.
