But there is some other thing that concerns me about our understanding of money and wealth and our constant obsession with the big money holders (which many of us feel is immoral and should be stopped).
Some years ago Joseph Stiglitz, a famous economist, gave a talk in London that seemed to give the idea that billionaires came into your bedroom at night and stole money from your wallet or purse. That they got their money by raiding your account.
If you look at the major wealth businesses of today, they are nearly all providers of services and goods to the public. We buy the services or goods they offer. And that’s how their owners become billionaires.
Yet our world is still obsessed with a very old-fashioned and outdated reality that predates Silicon Valley. The big players that become billionaires today, the robbers, are little more than the merchants of old but having a bigger often more international marketplace. They sell globally to people who seem so desperately to want their products and services.
In short, on many occasions we build the billionaires. The oil magnates of old sold us what they got out of the ground, which made them millionaires and multimillionaires. Now we continue our affections for certain merchants or service providers by turning them into the 21st-century version of an old merchant; but now with vastly more wealth because they involve vastly more customers.
I raise these points because I am very interested in the idea that we need to develop new ways of thinking about the world. That we have to pierce through its appearance to the true reality that exists beyond appearance. And that the reality behind the big money is that we are the owners of the purse strings – but we do not exercise our power.
To realise the power of our purchasing power is as powerful, if not more so, than our vote. If you look at our vote it often adds up to nothing in influencing a change of direction in our politics, something that we often desire but never seem to see. Yet we can see where our pounds go when we support the big players. Every little sliver of money that we spend in the marketplace bolsters the fortunes of people we largely do not like. And because of that we are caught in a very difficult and contradictory position.
If our forefathers were involved in slavery and many reaped its benefits then current generations could be said to be the beneficiaries of this billionaire capitalism and all of its vastness that we abhor, all of its ability to produce people whose values we don’t want to know about. That tying of us into capitalism must and should make us think. That our pension funds, if we or our mums and dads have one, drive forward capital and its controlling of lives and its exploiting of the poorest in the world.
And that virtually all the wealth of the recent big billionaires is the result of them tapping into the appetites of people who want what they have to sell.
I’m sure we don’t want to hear about how much we are tied into capitalism when actually we live in a culture that is very anti-capitalism, if only in appearance. I was reminded of this the other day when it was brought to my attention that while people were stuck in poverty, the government was wining and dining billionaires to come and invest their monies in the British economy, money they probably would have obtained from a pension fund.
Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that if you want to provide social security for people in need, and more of it, you have to get the taxable income base up, get more people into work, with jobs provided by these bleedin’ billionaires.
Of course, we could devise a way of really taxing the big income generators who make money out of UK purchasers, but no one seems to have solved that problem.
At the moment, because we create billionaires we seem to need them in order to create more prosperity – so that we can then give the poor more.
John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.
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