When wealth becomes murder...

I have nothing against the reasonable accumulation of wealth. Please, go out and work hard and earn a good living. Make a comfortable life for yourself. Provide well for your family. Buy that nice car, heck, buy two or three. Build your dream house, if you want have a second one on a tropical beach somewhere. Travel the world, enjoy nice meals, I hope that you can accumulate enough wealth to have a pleasant and wonderful life.

But do you need 100 cars? Do you need ten mansions? Do you need a Swiss bank account overflowing with money that you will never spend?

Have you ever considered what all of your wealth means to other people? You may think you are a wonderful person because you use your wealth to build business empires that employ large numbers of people, but that has nothing to do with generosity. Employment is a transaction, you exchange money for labor, and in most cases you pay as little as you can possibly get by with. You don't provide jobs out of the goodness of your heart or to make the world a better place, you hire the minimum number of people and pay the lowest possible wages to get the benefit you desire, more wealth for you to hoard.

Wealth is not a zero sum game over a long period of time. New wealth can, in rare circumstances, be generated from nothing. But at any given moment there is a set, limited, amount of wealth in the world. The gains of one mean that others will loose, at least in the short term. When a person has more wealth than they can ever use they are denying that wealth to everyone else. They are removing that money from the economy. They are preventing others from having the money required to feed their children properly or to get the medical care they need or to have suitable housing. When laws are passed to reduce funding for programs that help those in need so that the wealthy can gain even more wealth that they have no real use for it is even worse. It is promoting the suffering and death of those in need, It is, in my opinion, the indirect killing of those without wealth. It is class based genocide happening slowly enough that we don't notice it. It is murder.

In many countries around the world you will find "Duty to Rescue" laws on the books. These laws state that if you see someone in immediate danger you have a legal obligation to try and help them if you can do so without risking your own safety. If you stand by and do nothing you are breaking the law. We don't have laws like this in the US, the tax bill just passed shows that we favor the exact opposite idea. We know we have people in our country who are homeless and hungry and unable to get the medical care they need and we want to make things even harder on them. We want them to die.

There is nothing wrong with wealth, but excessive wealth should be seen for what it is, a crime against humanity. For now it seems we are happy living in a society where we think there are some perfectly acceptable, even commendable, ways of killing people. We can change this, at least we can change it if we haven't become too comfortable with the killing.