Justification of wealth

so we have this vast inequality of wealth, where we have dozens of
individuals whose wealth is equal to half the entire planet earth…

so, how do we justify that vast accumulation of wealth by a few individuals?

Under the old rules, that wealth was justified by the “righteousness” of
the individual in question… they were favored by god…as the king
or monarch was also favored by god…but as Nietzsche as written,
god is dead…so now, how do we justify the accumulation of wealth based
natural, none metaphysical grounds?

we declare them the ‘‘winners’’ by the impersonal forces of Capitalism…
as if capitalism were some kind of objective test of our
worthiness or the ‘‘righteousness’’ of our soul…

but the fact is that capitalism is not objective in any sense of the
word…let us look at the very first principle of capitalism…
the pursuit of money/wealth for its own value…this very act
devalues, dehumanizes human beings and their values…
for we are to seek wealth/money over human values like love,
hope, justice, peace to name just a few values that are devalued
in the search for wealth/money…

to accept that devaluation of human values to seek wealth is
by its very definition, nihilism…to accept the seeking
of wealth over the pursuit of human values such as love, justice for example,
is nihilism…

hence our modern day pursuit of wealth over human values makes
modern day society… a nihilistic society…

if our modern day state/society is nihilistic, how can we then
justify the accumulation of wealth?

we can’t…

now what?

Kropotkin

The harder you work the less you make.

A CEO sitting in an air conditioned office with a beautiful blonde secretary attending to his every need has never done a days WORK in his life!

A garbage man, working his butt off all day long makes chump change. A CEO in a suite and tie wouldn’t get his own coffee, and makes BILLIONS!

In this system, the hardest working people make the least, and the people making the most do nothing except flap their lips all day long. They wouldn’t dare come close to real work, it would cause them to sweat and get their tie dirty.

…but if the CEO’s company heads towards rocky times, the CONSUMER takes the hit, not the CEO. His salary and bonus doesn’t decrease due to his lackluster performance, no, the consumer makes up the difference.

Slavery: It’s not just for Blacks anymore.

I think the slave owners figured out that housing and feeding slaves is too expensive. Why not have all the people be slaves, and not feed or house them. Let them pay for their own housing and food. If they don’t work hard enough and provide good cheap labor, they won’t be able to survive. They will be homeless and hungry.

…and don’t you worry about them having too much money. We’ll take most of that in the name of “TAX” and the rest of what they make will be our profits, fees, licenses, gas, etc.

In this system, the people (slaves) must work EXTRA HARD, in the name of having two or three “jobs” in order to pay the rent for a cockroach infested dump of an apartment. Then we’ll hammer 'em with huge electric bills, mandatory car insurance, life insurance, health insurance. They’ll be thanking us for having another job and working harder. Yeah, that’s the ticket!!

Combined, probably not individually. But yes, I do agree with you in seeing the growing concentration of wealth as a problem.

In almost every case, they’ve provided goods and services that the rest of humanity is willing to pay for.

Jeff Bezos is by some calculations the richest man on Earth. He also created Amazon. How many ILP participants have shopped at Amazon? Many/all of us I’d guess. A small percentage of each of those transactions goes into Jeff’s pocket.

I don’t want to applaud Amazon as a 100% good thing because it isn’t. It’s driving small mainstreet business out of existence everywhere and laying waste to our cities and towns. But what it provides are things that people freely choose to pay for.

Thats still the case.

Every one of us has needs. Many of those needs are things that we can’t supply for ourselves. The fundamental question of society is why somebody else, who has needs of his/her own, instead labor to meet my needs? Slavery is one answer. But absent slavery, what other solution is there?

Mutual Aid works in small social groups like those found among paleolithic hunter-gatherers. These groups were small enough that everyone knew everyone else and where everyone was linked together by ties of blood. Extended families in other words. An individual’s survival chances were greater as a member of the group so working to further the group’s interest was also in the individual’s interest.

But what happened in the neolithic age when agriculture was invented and villages and then cities started to appear? Suddenly people were confronted with strangers whenever they left their homes. And what motivation would an absolute stranger have to help them? Or conversely, why should they help the stranger?

That’s when something new appeared in the center of town, the market. People set up stalls offering their produce. Other people would offer their own produce in exchange and deals were struck. Eventually money was invented as a medium of exchange to facilitate these transactions.

Dollars are votes when it comes to the allocation of social resources. People decide what they want to spend their dollars on, and whoever provides those goods and services reaps those dollars.

And how do people get their dollars? By in turn being of service to others. By having a job, by being employed.

The market system, given the realities of urbanized life. Is how Mutual Aid is maintained in a society composed almost entirely of strangers.

a few years ago, one of the wireless companies, sprint or Verizon
lost millions of customers and lost BILLIONS of dollars…
and what did the CEO get?

a bonus of about 30 million dollars… his bonus went from about 30 million
to roughly 60 million dollars…he got rewarded for being a really, really shitty
CEO… if I was that bad at my job, I wouldn’t get a bonus, at my level,
we don’t get those…but I would be fired…

and what is the moral of this story?

you tell me…

Kropotkin

K: but did Bezos for example, did he provide these services single handily?
nope, so why does he get the wealth and not the people who in fact actually
perform the service in question…I get $24 bucks an hour being a checker
in a supermarket… the CEO of my company made $28 million dollars…
and yet, the fact is without me, he doesn’t make shit… I create the wealth
by checking in or scanning in enough products to pay for my wage…
thus say, I scan in $25 dollars worth of goods, every hour… that $1.00 in
wealth/profits I created but goes to the corporation and thus becomes part of
the bonus of the CEO of my company… my effort and hard work created that
dollar of profits, but it doesn’t go to me… it is in fact stolen from me
and then there are hundred of thousands of checkers like myself in my company…
and each one produces more in profits then they are paid and that wealth is stolen
by the company… and thus the CEO makes his multi-million dollar bonus from
the work I did and other checkers did, but not from anything he did…
and how exactly is that fair?

I do the work and he gets the $28 million dollars?

explain that to me…

Kropotkin