As Wealth Goes

Steven Pinker, in Enlightenment Now, wrote “[Wealth] is created primarily by knowledge and cooperation: networks of people arrange matter into improbable but useful configurations and combine the fruits of their ingenuity and labor.” (80)

That is to say, the wealthy did not create their wealth alone, but with the cooperation of many people. The point that Pinker is making is that wealth is created, wealth has a cause, and that creation is the result of many inventors.

Consider corporations. By their very definition they are not individualistic. Therefore, the wealth that they create is not individualistically created. But many of the wealthy, especially what is sometimes called the “ultra” wealthy, make the argument that they deserve the wealth that they have. They are correct, but so do all of the other people that it took to create that wealth. Corporations are, in fact, the result of a community workforce.

Today’s political and social divide is not that of ideological beliefs, but of wealth. That there are those that choose to defend the unjust deserts of the wealthy is another matter, but it cannot be argued that the wealthy pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. What the wealthy are doing at this point, for the most part, is dismantling a working government and hence a viable community and at the same time claiming that they have right to do so because they alone have created their wealth.

I know one man that has done just that, created his own wealth, and he had a hard row to hoe. But his wealth, even his, has been made on the understanding that there were others backs and others minds that put money in his bank account. Whatever else we choose to fight for, we must remember this: wage labor does not have to be slave labor.