A Wee bit of Nice News

Whenever a group of left leaning armchair politicians/philosophers gather to discuss the chronic and systemic ills of our society, at some point someone says: the rich are not paying their fair share and they need to pay more taxes! And they are right. In a perfect world there would not be this huge inequality of wealth. For example Inequality.org (https://inequality.org/facts/global-inequality/) reports that "8.6 percent of the global population owns 85.6 percent of global wealth". Everyone other than the rich would agree that such an imbalance, is at best, obscene. It is almost inconceivable that the world economy can be sustained with such inequality. It, on some days. boggles my mind that we have all gone along with this.

The common man's acceptance of capitalism lies in part in the fact that at turn of the last century and well past the 1940s, there were numerous examples of how the overly wealthy contributed to society. For example the existence of the original libraries in hundreds and hundreds small towns and large cities is because of the contributions of Carnegie - an American capitalist; the much maligned Rockefeller gave a minimum of 10% of his annual income for all of his adult life to charities. The reason why so many buildings and public institutions carry the name of an individual, is because that individual donated a substantial amount of money. When I went to the University of New Brunswick in the late 1960s, it felt as if almost all of the major buildings bore the names of either the Irvings or the Beaverbrooks.

I would never suggest that these men were always good and kind people. They were not. They used resources and their workers with the same attitude: it was their right to use everything and everyone to maximize their income. They were however, public in their giving albeit with some fairly strong morality attitude attached.

However, more recently it appears as if there is less giving from those rich capitalist and more focus on maximizing wealth for the very few. Don Pitts in a CBC (https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/share-buyback-tech-stocks-1.4902823 )opinion piece has suggested that the tax cuts given to the large tech companies in the USA have not resulted in increased investment in the US but rather the increased profits have been used to increase the value of the shares. The media is full of stories of companies laying off employees to increase their bottom line - the investors demand it - there does not ever appear to be any consideration of the cost to the individual or to the community. I think there is a public perception, at least in terms of USA politics, that money is far more likely to be donated to political rather than to charitable causes.

However, while it may be a very small drop in the bucket - CBC (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/refugee-fund-private-sponsors-1.4904367 )has reported that 685 refugees were supported coming to Canada through the donations from "major philanthropists". 3.5 million dollar may not be a lot of money but we need to learn how to make public note of these donations - perhaps the recognition will encourage others to do the same. It is always tempting and far too easy to find reasons to dislike a group of people. The rich are easy targets for those of us who have spent a life time railing against the profound injustices of our world - but in doing so we have run the risk of making the rich our enemies rather than our allies.

Just as it is wrong to lump all people of a certain skin colour, ethnic origin or faith into one disparaged group - it is wrong to assume that all wealthy people are always bad.