I found this meme a while ago that I occasionally use as my profile picture for Facebook. It says ‘keep your coins, I want change’. Personally I think the most charitable and useful thing a person of means can do to help the poor isn’t to give hand outs to individuals, but to campaign for a fairer economic system, and to bring that conversation into their social life to spread awareness in their own arena in the hope that it will start a national conversation and (this is the hard part) live with the conflict, social awkwardness and rejection that it will bring. And it does bring a lot of strife. It certainly won’t make you popular in moneyed circles.
We only keep track of petty theft these days. Wholesale theft has become a part of life, so much so that it sounds like common sense. We know there’s a property bubble. An easy way to tell is to compare it to other ways of making money. The Property market as everyone knows is one of the best ways to get ahead. A fair chunk of small businesses are increasingly only servicing people who are benefiting from the property market (what Curtis Whit calls the ‘entourage economy’, just have a look at the demographics of the people in a cafe or bar these days compared to 20 years ago. How they dress. Listen to what they are talking about – everyone going on about their degree or investment property or their new portable taco bar, to be crowd funded. Rich kids competing over who’s more worthwhile, a competition no broke person could ever keep up with), everyone else is priced out.
Perverse incentives to invest in one industry comes at a cost to other industries, and a bloated property market comes at the cost to all industries, as Winston Churchill so eloquently points out in his famous land monopoly speech in 1909 (https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/churchill-winston_mother-of-all-monopolies-1909.htm). Why put all your effort into a small business when you could simply buy an investment property and let it earn money by itself? Why waste effort trying to think of products or services when you can simply collect rent? The bloated property market comes at the expense of opportunity and innovation. Another symptom is nepotism. When the money stagnates in a certain group, they get lazy and useless, and tend to employ and make deals with people from their own lazy useless group, robbing opportunity from the best people for the job, the most capable, further entrenching market inequality (the same thing happens in a class system. The upper class becoming increasingly useless and having trouble justifying their position to the poor, become cruel. Resort to oppression.)
No wonder productivity is so low in Australia if we’re taking incentives out of innovation and putting it in the property market, if we’re taking the jobs from the most capable and giving it to friends and family rather than the best person for the job. I’d really love to see what kind of innovative businesses would pop up if investment were redirected towards the people with the best ideas, the best business model. And I don’t think this is only having an effect on small business. I think it has a stagnating effect across the board. In white collar industries where science and medicine have stalled, in the way we think (it has made us lazy thinkers), in entertainment where we’re rehashing ideas over and over again.
We see ourselves as open minded yet we only tolerate a certain kind of person in our midst and see variety through a very narrow window (and then wonder why we’re all bored out of our minds!). We ridicule new ideas and we’re jealous of the capable and creative among us. So we rob them of opportunity. It’s wholesale theft. But woe-be-tide the hungry man who steals a block of cheese!
The last thought I want to leave you with is that my only goal in writing this is to encourage people to be more politically alive in this arena. I know it sounds gloomy, and for the people on the wrong end of the stick it is. But despite what the government says there are easy fixes, and it’s not that complicated. Take the billions of dollars you give away to the rich including the roughly 10 billion dollar yearly tax loss from negative gearing for property, tax lost through corporate loopholes and off shore investment and other forms of chicanery and put it into social programs, education and small business. Some of the money being put in the wrong place is doing damage anyway, so literally take it back and put it where it’s needed. As a general principle it’s as simple as that. The issues that cause poverty aren’t “complicated” as certain interests would like us to think. It only seems complicated if you refuse to accept that we live in one of the worst countries in the world when it comes to market inequality(or, so says Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize winning economist in his lecture in Adelaide, which you can find here: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/joseph-stiglitz3a-the-price-of-inequality/5833292)
So DO something.
SAY something.
Have HOPE and FIGHT FOR A BETTER WORLD.
It could be as simple as making a senate submission or showing your support for an on-line campaign. You’d do it for asylum seekers, you do it for starving people overseas, why not campaign for your broke mates who you know and love? The people in the streets who you pass every day? We don’t need your hand outs, we’ve adjusted to having nothing and we’re all the stronger for it. We know how to survive. We need your political support.
“Philanthropy is commendable, but must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.”
~Martin Luthor King Jr., ‘On Being a Good Neighbor’
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