Edit: I did not literally mean going to rich people’s houses and rob the money.
But to just pass a law that takes most of their money and redistributes it.
In: Economics
Religion is the opioid of the poor. For thousands of years the poor and middle class were told to behave themselves so they can get into a paradise known as heaven.
Soldiers and cops are middle class. They protect the wealthy. Rich people can afford bodyguards and also WALLS to protect them.
Lazy poor people are too lazy to start a revolution.
They tried it a few times, in communist countries, and (to some extent) in heavily unionized industries or employee-owned companies. There was not much success, and a lot failure.
Most of Wealth is not money, it is businesses: the fryers in MacDonalds, the buildings where , and the MacDonalds brand itself (b/c it attracts more customers than “Random Joe’s burgers”).
So if your 99% use all of their newly acquired wealth to get themselves better food and clothes, they will be destroying jobs.
So it would be better to to continue running the business, but for the benefit of employees rather than owners. But it turns out that employees often choose to sacrifice long-term prospects for short-term gain. E.g. Detroit automakers are not doing well, b/c they have no money left for developing better cars, and worker’s rights undermine quality standards.
It has been tried. It was called communism, and all that happened was that a few persons that ran the government got all the wealth, and the rest of the people became even poorer.
Those that ran the government used the army and police – who they paid adequately and disciplined harshly enough so they would obey – to prevent the people from rebelling against them.
Because the sheer organisation that would require is phenomenal, and incredibly easy to disrupt. Most people don’t really care about the wealth distribution itself, they just want to personally have money. The 1% can give select people money – ie pay them – to suppress the remainder of the 99%.
It also doesn’t help that the people who run the countries and thus the people who create the laws tend to be part of the 1%, or at least interested in maintaining the 1%’s wealth, and a large portion of the 99% are stupid enough to believe what the politicians say.
Basically, money + ignorance = corruption, and the developed world has a hell of a lot of money and a hell of a lot of ignorance. The 1% spend a lot of money on preventing the 99% rising up, and you gotta hand it to them, they do a damned good job. Indeed, despite the fact I’m being highly critical of the system right now, you and I both know that I’d never *actually* do anything about it, because that would be too inconvenient to me and I think it wouldn’t change anything.
Because the 99% are not one universal block of people that can all do… anything. If they were, they could.
Because those same ultra-wealthy people control all the levers of power, and they will *never* vote to give away their own money. The system is set up so it’s next to impossible for a person of average means to attain any real political power, and as a result, the people are charge of making the laws are the wealthy themselves.
Do prison inmates get to control a prison just because they’re the majority?
That would require a great deal of co-operation. The wealthy tend to own and control the means by which messages and information is mediated.
>But to just pass a law that takes most of their money and redistributes it.
Because a) that would solve nothing and b) the situation would return to the initial 1%/50% in two generations.
Because it’s not in physical cash that we could go take and there are a lot of people who make ALOT of money helping the rich keep and manage their money.
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