The Rich and The Poor
(Traducción al inglés del artículo original en castellano)

Speaking about the unequal distribution of incomes
and wealth, we keep forgetting to underline, the
empirical fact that this inequality gets faster and
faster, to describe the reasons for that and to
consider the consequences and above all to refute
the false ideological legitimating justifications given
by the continuously barking docs. Most of all we
overlook that the inequality –you may call it take
whatever you can get is galloping unbridled on a
planetary scale and also on a local scale, in poor
countries and also in rich countries. It’s been a long
time since the social; the ethical and the
aesthetically acceptable levels have been long
exceeded. The extreme inequality has made our
world an unstable, unacceptable and horrible place.
The 84 richest persons on earth own more than the
GDP of China and its 1,3 billion inhabitants.
In 1998 Michael Eisner, chief executive of Disney,
earned 576,6 millions of dollars, that equals to 25
070 times the average income of the workers in the
same company. In the same year, the United States
citizen, Bill Gates, had at his disposal more assets
than 45% of the households of the whole country
(“Too Much”, winter 1999 and The Nation dated 19
July 1999).

Today, 5% of the United States households with a
major buying power hold about 50% of the national
revenue. At the same time the revenue in 80
countries is lower than it was a decade ago.
Whereas half of mankind, the most deprived and
vulnerable part, that is 3 billion individuals, have to
live on less than 2 dollars a day and among them
1.3 billions have less than 1 dollar a day. The
American economist Robert Franck, well known by
economy students for his famous book about
economic theory, explains that in his country, the
richest 1% of the population hold 70% of all the
revenues produced since the mid seventies. (Luxury
Fever, Simon & Schuster, 1999). No comparable
figures are reported about the Kingdom of Spain.
But it is very probable, according to fiscal experts
who spent years raking the field, that the figures
could be scandalous enough to be kept secret.
Never in the history of mankind there were so few
rich individuals that rich and so many more poor
people that poor.

The above has the following bad consequences.
First, it makes people vulnerable, in different
grades, and the lower classes of the society grow
larger and larger. This vulnerability causes
dependencies; with these dependencies, the liberty
is lost. The lost liberty, in different grades, causes
slave conditions and the loss of selfrespect.
Second, as it puts huge powers and resources in the
hands of a few, they can influence the political
process in favour of their privileged interests, thus
destroying all hopes for a real democracy, denying
political equality which is the base and the ideal of a
civil society. Finally, the extreme inequality between
the rich and the poor (in an extensive sense) will
break up the community, brake up the ties of
fraternity and respect, on one side. The greed of a
few individuals, on the other side, even if there is
no envy and no resentment, there will be at least
frustration and, more frequently, the desperation of
many.

Regardless of this rationale, the justifications of
inequality are abundant. The first one is that people
deserve what they got. So, the rich deserve wealth,
first for their entrepreneurial dynamism, the poor –
for their lack of aptitude and effort deserve the
opposite social destiny. So the loyal and efficient
worker deserves to keep his job, anybody loosing
his job deserves the lesson of unemployment, and
deserves to stay out of job, if he does not show
enough effort and flexibility in his active search for
a new job. There are plenty of opportunities; you
just have to know how to find them. This
meritbased justification of inequality is as false and
demagogic as the fact is true that nobody morally
deserves neither its genetic destiny nor its social
destiny, in fact it is unequally distributed. Nobody
morally deserves the family, which he is born in by
fate, rich or poor, decent or depraved. And he does
not deserve, the opportunities –favourable or not
that the family can offer him. And the same could
be said about the talents –few or manyone is born
with: nobody morally deserves them. If it is true
that justice aims at restraining the arbitration of
fate –social and genetic, it would not be just to
allow that individuals enjoy without limits or
constraints their undeserved better opportunities,
that are given them by fate. The distribution of the
genetic capital –like John Rawls never stop stressing
is a common value of the society, but only as long
as society promotes it or as long it is accepted by
the society.

The second justification of the inequality converts it
to the price to be paid for liberty. In a world ruled
by the law of the free market and obliged to the
holy sacrosanct principle of freedom of choice, an
interventionist State could enforce redistributing
policies and equalizing legislations, but only for the
price of restrictions to individual liberty, reducing
the options to choose from. This argument is as
demagogically false as the fact is true that
inequality is a reason for a loss of liberty, the more
profound the more dramatic is the inequality.
Therefore the lack of liberty – to decide, to act and
even to reject is the experience of a worker with a
precarious job hardly making a living from his
wages and not sure if he still ha a job tomorrow. It
is what goes through a women suppressed by her
husband, discriminated against in any opportunity
of life. It is what the long term unemployed
endures, undergoing the social disgrace of the
dependency on public welfare (if he gets any). The
liberty is taken from the poor who depends on the
charity of others. The liberty is taken from a
subordinate (in the hierarchy of a company, for
instance) who has to agree with everything because
his vital needs and desires depend on the goodwill
of his boss. The lack of liberty, finally, is the
experience of those who only can live with the
permit of others. We should not forget what Juvenal
said: “There are many things which may not be
uttered by men in threadbare coats”. The
contemporary world suffers from a deeprooted
problem, the loss of liberty, because the resources,
opportunities and wealth are distributed so crudely
unequally.

The third justification puts the blame for the
inequality on the government, whatever kind of
government. Governments –here it goes promote
inequality with their ambiguous policies cutting
down on opportunities for individual development.
So, for instance, unemployment –a terrible source
of social inequality could be prevented if job
markets were less rigid and employers get more
facilities –all facilities! To hire and fire. And yet you
would have more opportunities to create jobs –and
wealth for all if governments bet openly on the
productivity and the competitiveness of the
enterprises, reducing taxes, cutting on social
expenses, privatising public services and aiming for
a zero budget deficit. This justification of inequality
is as demagogically false as the fact is true that
when governments did precisely that and the more
they promoted policies deregulating job markets
and the more they offered the fiscal incentives, the
more they generated increases of inequality.
What about the causes of the inequality? The
inequality has many causes, but the main reason –
without any doubt must be searched in the actual
capitalist model of growth and development and in
the current antisocial model of private property.
Capitalism is a way of production it subsists on
inequality and fuels it, it subsist further on the
inequality between work and capital. It reproduces
and increases this inequality because capitalism
distinguishes in assigning resources of power to
those who possess and those who don’t. And it
distributes social power so unequally as it is based
on a model of property and appropriation that has
no set limit to its accumulation capacity. It allows
outstanding mega concentrations of economic and
social power that is not only beyond democratic
control but it also maintains an institutional and
political over representation for its privileged and
minority interests. The battle –currently lost for a
while against the extreme inequality of incomes and
wealth requires searching for alternatives –one can
say partially and gradually to capitalism,
alternatives of a socialrepublican type (Preferably,
but not only, the Basic Income for all citizens. On
other occasion we have developed alternatives, for
example, at www.redrentabasica.org), Alternatives
that enable the society to recover democratic
control over economic decisions, and also enable
the individuals –a lot of, millions of them to recover
the control over their own life, which means, their
autonomy.

El País, 16-11-2002