Read what an ex-businessman finally came to realise about income inequality. Lee Hsien Loong wants to bring in more billionaires and claim this will help Singaporeans with the trickle-down effect. Read why this is never going to happen. And for people who dont believe Singapore will become a Third World country at the rate we are going, well. These two men, President Obama and the pope, know what a recovering i-banker like me has learned: that income inequality is one of the most morally corrosive issues facing the world today – “the defining challenge of our time”, as the president says. Except that when they met today for the first time at the Vatican, when the president told the pontifex he was a great admirer, Francis had the upper hand because of what he knows that Obama and the bankers do not. Barack Obama is not Pope Francis, and not just because the slums of Buenos Aires are so much worse than the South Side of Chicago. Pope Francis knows, in a visceral way, that the income equality we have in the US and Europe will get much worse if nothing changes. More importantly, he knows that these first-world problems are embryonic relative to those back home in Argentina. The pope knows that the US is moving toward a Latin America-style economy, one wherein the Koch brothers get multiplied many times over – one wherein the wealthy don’t just want more money or opportunity, they want power. The problem with Francis’ Argentina writ large is a 1% that wants a political system run with the intent to guarantee that their wealth is never threatened. The problem with that is a wealthy class that wants the working class to be disposable, voiceless and immobilized. This is the real issue President Obama faces: he needs to stare down, as Pope Francis has, the morally and intellectually corrupt philosophy that unregulated free markets help everyone. It is a philosophy at the heart of the American conservative movement. When needed, conservatives drag out a gaggle of economists to argue their position. These economists, always a thoughtful lot when it comes to human behavior, know the wealthy will benefit far more. Yet the GOP’s sham philosophers argue that growth, even if unevenly distributed, will be a net benefit – because the winners will win more than the losers lose. We will then all share the winnings, goes this bankrupt economic philosophy, either by way of investments that boost jobs, or else from politically forced redistribution by way of taxes. The sharing-the-winnings part never happens. It certainly didnt happen prior to the crisis, and it didnt happen even as the American economy collapsed. The winners kept using their new wealth to further empower themselves. They did this by flooding the political system with money to stack the deck. Rather than invest in job-friendly projects, they moved production to places with the cheapest labor and the fewest regulations. When you bend the rules to favor the wealthy, they never give back.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 02:15:33 +0000
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