Slaying Dragons #32 – Inequality

John Watkinson contemplates inequality.

Tragic recent events have led to riots and to the slogan that black lives matter. As Martin Luther King observed, riots are what happens when people feel they don’t have a voice. 

Using simplistic logic, breaking social distancing rules in the middle of a pandemic is at least unwise. As Private Eye pointed out, there’s an irony in fighting for breath having caught the virus in a riot about fighting for breath due to police brutality. Simplistic logic doesn’t apply here. The rioters might be unwise, but it may also be that they have nothing to lose.

The way that Police go about things and the way the population reacts is not the problem; those things are merely symptoms of the problem. What, then, is the problem?

There is only one criterion for success in the USA, and that is to have made a profit. Nothing else matters in the slightest. Whilst there is nothing wrong in principle with profit, the problem is in the view that nothing else matters. 

Anyone who makes a profit can spend some of it lobbying politicians to enact legislation that increases profit. It is possible to make more profit by paying employees less and by making them work longer hours. But most profitable of all is slavery, where the workers are owned. 

Having made more profit, it then becomes possible to fund the campaign of a tame politician to ensure his election. It becomes possible to buy newspapers and radio and TV stations to make sure that nothing negative is ever…

(contd)
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