Haves & Have Nots

My old history teacher would often solemnly declare – in his thick Welsh brogue – that history is an ongoing struggle between the Haves and the Have-nots. The older I get, the more I tend to agree. Politics, religion, race are all significant factors but dig deep enough & you find that money (& what it represents) is invariably the root cause.

A quick glance at the news will confirm that it’s the poor & the disenfranchised that are hit hardest in the wars in Afghanistan & Iraq. Even the US troops sent over to fight on the front line are largely recruited from the lower classes. Coverage of the recent Gaza crisis underlines the disparity between the invaders & the invaded: TV footage contrasts impoverished Palestinian victims with middle-class Israelis being interviewed in relatively affluent neighbourhoods. OK, so you have to allow for biased editing but the point is that conflict rarely has a negative impact on the rich & powerful. On the contrary, there are big profits to be made for the entrepreneurial in oil, defence contracts & even opium. Like Deep Throat said, you simply have to “follow the money”.

The fact is that, according to economic historians, global inequality has never been greater. So how much money is there in the world? Let’s assume that there’s a finite amount, that a limited amount of money is available to the 6 billion & more people who inhabit the earth. What then would be one person’s equal share?

According to an estimate in the essay How much money, Gold does the world hold?,  the global money supply exceeds $60.2 trillion. Divide that into the global population & you get $9393. The inevitable implication is that, when a person gets rich, people somewhere else become poorer as a consequence. This is the kind of unsettling logic that made Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth program so popular & so dangerous.