Suppose
you wake up one morning and decide that the socioeconomic system under which we
live is not working as it should in that it no longer responds to the needs of
most of us, let alone the needs of all of us. And you want to find out why
things are the way they are.
You
get the idea that the best way to find out, is to go to the places where
societies live under systems that have not developed as much as ours, and study
them to determine what changes made our modern system what it is. The intent of
your study is to find a way that will reverse the trend, and give us back a
system that will again respond to the needs of most of us, if not the needs of
every one of us. And so, you assign to yourself the task of finding out what's
going on.
You
visit underdeveloped places where the societies follow norms as different from
each other as the natives of the North Pole, those of South America, South Asia
and Central Africa. You live long enough among each of them to develop a good
sense of what makes them tick in the way that we used to tick but lost it
during our journey to becoming the modern society that we are today. You
catalog the similarities and differences you observe between them, as well as
between them and us.
In
all of this, the one thing that stands out and offers a clue as to what's wrong
with us, is the reality that you never saw someone in those places, deprived of
something if there was enough to fill the needs of everyone. In other words,
you will never see someone go hungry in those places if there is enough food to
feed everyone. And you'll never see someone deprived of a necessity of life, if
there is enough to cover everyone.
These
societies may have good years and bad years, but each of them has developed a
system by which to regulate the distribution of what's available so as to be
fair and equitable toward each and every member. Thus, you may see different
levels of wealth and poverty in each of these societies, but when there is
enough to go around, everyone gets something no matter what belongs to whom.
You
determine this to be what's missing in our modern society where plenty of
everything is produced and yet there are those who go hungry and deprived of
other necessities of life. And so, you set out to discover how it is that in an
era of unprecedented wealth, there are people who live, eat, sleep and defecate
in the street, just feet away from mansions where enough money is spent on
luxuries in one day, that can feed thousands of the poor for a year. And so,
you assign to yourself the new task of finding out what's going on.
To
that end, you follow the events as they develop day after day on the
socioeconomic front. Your aim is to identify what goes on inside the heads of
the people who shape the opinion of the masses, allowing for situations of
extreme privation to coexist with situations of extreme abundance, and be
accepted as normal.
One
of the works you consult came under the title: “The spread of America's
self-inflicted debt crisis,” an article that also came under the subtitle:
“Shutdown has left the country on the cusp of economic collapse not seen since
Great Depression.” It was written by Victor Davis Hanson and published on May
27, 2020 in The Washington Times.
What
strikes you as revealing in this article is that Victor Hanson does not mention
the unequal distribution of wealth even once. He thus rejects the notion that
alleviating the problem of the debt, which is the topic of his discussion, can
be addressed by creating a more equitable economy. When you come right down to
it, this attitude is due to the narrative that has prevailed for a long time
without someone responding to it.
Here
is how the narrative went: The numbers do not lie. There are few rich people
and many poor ones. Even if you distribute all that belongs to the rich among
the poor, each poor person will receive so little, it will make no difference
in their life or that of their dependents. And while this is true, the country
will suffer because without incentives, the rich will not work hard enough to
make the country richer.
And
here is the response that has remained absent during all that time: Whether
your argument is correct or not, you should be able to flip it and obtain the
same result. That's because those same numbers will not lie. In fact, this is
what they’ll say to you: Give incentive to the poor because a little
improvement in the lives of so many will cause the economy to get richer
regardless of what the small number of rich will do or fail to do.
But
instead of starting by accepting that premise and arguing for a robust growth
in an equitable economy that can solve the debt problem, Victor Hanson rehashed
the same old arguments and reached the same old conclusions. They are that the
situation is hopeless and getting more hopeless by the day.