A recent article in Common Dreams documents the increasing inequality in our country, and around the world, and warns about the devastating future this will lead to. Look at these statistics:
US
- The richest 24,000 adults (the .01%) have an average of over $400,000,000 in wealth (mostly financial)
- The poorest 120,000,000 adults (the bottom 50%) have an average of about $8,500 in wealth (mostly housing)
World
- The richest 500,000 adults (the .01%) have an estimated average of $30,000,000 in wealth
- The poorest 2.5 billion adults (the bottom 50%) have an average of about $673 in wealth
In the article, author Paul Buchheit reports, “An incredible $14 trillion of global wealth is being hidden in offshore tax havens. That’s approximately the total wealth of the entire United Kingdom.” These numbers are outrageous and should horrify every Latter-day Saint.
In the Book of Mormon (3 Nephi, chapters 6-7) we learn what inevitably happens when inequality spreads throughout the land. The rich revile, afflict, and persecute the poor, the Church begins to be broken up, wickedness and violence increases, corruption is rampant, and peace fails. Eventually the government is destroyed and the people fall into tribalism.
Inequality literally kills people.
In the United States, “Life expectancy for the poorest classes is now equivalent to that of Sudan or Pakistan.”
Inequality is also “the best predictor of homicide, as reported in up to 40 studies. The FBI has found that over half of murders are caused not by theft or drugs or money or tainted love, but by a situation in which the killer has been somehow disrespected.”
“The World Economic Forum’s choice for the Number 1 Threat to the global economy” is Inequality. Yet in the US “a shockingly low 5 percent of the population believes inequality is a major issue, even as they suffer the physical and mental symptoms of a distressingly divided society.”
The public is woefully under-informed about this growing and critical problem, but we Mormons have long had clear warnings in the Book of Mormon about this very issue. We have also been taught that the warnings in the Book of Mormon were specifically written for our day. Yet American Mormons still blindly vote for Republicans, like Donald Trump and Orrin Hatch, who consistently, even proudly, make the problem worse.
Can we really expect God to protect us from the coming catastrophes if we helped cause them?
Source: Paul Buchheit, “How Inequality is Killing Off Humanity” Common Dreams, Monday, January 8, 2018.
But this is just capitalism doing its thing. Capital is always afraid of losing out to other capital. So we have COMPETITION for profits. And for that reason no amount of profits are ever enough for capital. As I make clear – I hope – in my webseries “Marx Lives” on youtube profits come mostly from SURPLUS VALUE – that portion of value added by labor for which it is not compensated. So capitalism demands ever greater accumulation at the top and want at the bottom. But you know I never hear capitalism criticized at Church. You?