| If
you can make three fishing reels per hour, and each reel has a sales
value of say $20, you are producing a value of $60 an hour. (To keep it
simple we are assuming that you are making the reel from start to
finish, though of course in reality other workers’ labor, which produced
the materials, energy, etc. to make a reel, would also add value to the
end product.) In the first two hours of each workday you have produced $120 of value. That’s fine. But you’re getting paid $120 for the whole 8-hour day so you’ve still got six hours to work producing fishing reels for which you will not get paid. If you’ve produced $120 worth of product in the first two hours, and you’re paid $120 for eight hours of work, where does the value of the other six hours — $360 — go? You are donating those hours of your labor, and the value your labor produces in those hours, to someone else’s welfare. And welfare is the correct word. We hear a lot of complaining about welfare these days. Hardly anyone wants to pay welfare to the poor anymore, but rarely do you hear complaints about welfare to the rich. Imagine now that you’ve found several hundred or even several thousand workers who are each donating six hours per day to your income. Think about the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars you would be raking in daily! This is not a fantasy. This is real life. There are people out there doing it right now. And we, the workers, are here, toiling away day after day, year after year, to keep them in Rolls Royces. In biology books they’re identified as parasites. In America they’re called privileged. So if you think you can’t make YOURSELF rich, think about how many OTHER PEOPLE you’ve already made rich. But there is a catch. (You knew all along there’d be a catch, didn’t you?) Well, it’s really a twofold catch, so let’s address them one at a time. First, you need two traits: greed and callousness. You have to be greedy enough to be concerned only with your own comforts, and callous enough to not care about the poor bastards who are struggling to support you. The second catch is that the misery you cause in the world will eventually catch up with you. The very wealthy are less and less able to enjoy their stolen wealth. As the world becomes more aware of how they acquired their wealth and of their pillage, they have to keep a low profile. Some live almost in hiding. They can no longer flaunt their wealth as they once did. They know that the misery they have sown is rapidly growing into a violent harvest. Look at crime in the streets. Look at terrorism throughout the world. Look at the world sitting on the brink of Armageddon. So you want to be rich? Good, go ahead, do it. But you’re going to have to share the consequences. Why, you ask, can’t I get rich and the rest of the world leave me alone to enjoy it? Because no one can get rich — I repeat, no one — without STEALING it from someone else. And therein lies the rub. If 500 people have to be poor so one person can be rich, there will never be peace in the world. Sociologists, criminologists, penologists and the police will give you 9,000 reasons for crime and 9,000 ways to combat it. Their answers to the problem are more and bigger prisons, more executions, gun control — the answers and excuses go on and on. Very few people want to face up to and admit that the prime reason for most crime, terrorism and world turmoil is poverty, the poverty produced by capitalism. So now you know how to become a billionaire. If, however, you lack the essential qualities of greed, callousness and cruelty, you have two other choices: You can continue to work without protest while the wealthy steal what you produce. Or you can work toward eliminating a system that allows parasites to live off the sweat, labor and anguish of millions of people. Now that you know how the rich get rich, perhaps you don’t want to be one of them after all. Not when you can live in a new society where everyone’s life would be enriched. previous page |