amodernmanifesto:

I OFTEN think that one of the tremendous tricks of capitalism is getting us to accept an absurd state of affairs as normal—inevitable even. But to quote one of my favorite poets, Naomi Shihab Nye, “If you tilt your head just slightly, it’s ridiculous.”

To give just one example, the United Nations came out with a report a couple years ago—a study of global wealth that found the world’s richest 1 percent owned 40 percent of all wealth and the top 10 percent owned 85 percent. Meanwhile, the poorest 50 percent—half the world’s population—own barely 1 percent of all wealth.

“These levels of inequality are grotesque,” said Duncan Green, head of research at Oxfam. “It is impossible to justify such vast wealth when 800 million people go to bed hungry every night. The good news is that redistribution would only have to be relatively small. Such are the vast assets of the rich that giving up a small part of their wealth could transform the lives of millions.”

This really gets to the heart of what is so crazy about capitalism—this gap between potential and reality. Take food production. There’s enough food produced in the world to make everyone fat, yet millions of people starve. The logic of the system is that the food must be destroyed rather than given away at a loss, or otherwise profits would suffer.