Two things that are dangerous
Two dangerous things about the Guardian article circulating today: the one that says 50% of all property is owned by the richest 1% of the world’s population.
The first dangerous thing is, it’s just a press release from Oxfam. I mean, literally, there was no reportage going on here. They basically ran with a shorter and slightly reworded press release, quotes and bullet points and all.
If you think I’m shitting you, here’s the press release. Also note, the chairman of a thing called the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism is a woman named Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild. Say, did you just hear the theme to the X-Files?
It’s shocking how much journalism is that and only that these days. How valuable a service is a press release aggregator, really?
The second thing is, they’re playing with fire. How very fucking easy it is to whip up class envy. Almost no-one on this earth — including some incredibly wealthy bastards — doesn’t look at some other wealthy bastard who has a few kgilliion more and think it’s not fair. The guys in first class you walk past to get to your miserable seat? They’re all thinking to themselves, “public transportation sucks. Why don’t I have a private jet?”
As conservatives, we are naturally disinclined to steal from our neighbor even if we do think he’s got nice stuff and more of it than he deserves. Plus, we know well the inviolable rule of wealth distribution — those that do the distributing get the wealth. And even so, it’s not too hard to get us hating on the rich folks.
But heed this statistic from the article: the world’s poorest 80% own 5.5% of the wealth. You know what that means? If you live in the West and have a basic middle-class existence, you’re almost certainly in that top 20%. And if you think the great sucking black hole of socialism will hit that top 1% and leave you and me — the rich bastards in the following 19% — alone, you haven’t been watching how it works.
January 19, 2015 — 11:10 pm
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