Friday
The term ‘one percent’ is widely identified as those who are perched on top of the system and, accordingly, living the champagne life – while the rest of us, the ninety-nine percent, struggle. They are most commonly typified as the inhabitants of Wall Street. It has become a pejorative.
That is all, of course, a generality. Some work their butts off predicting the needs and wants of the marketplace and satisfying it with a product. They are diligent and smart and deserve their money; others are, indeed, the proverbial leeches.
It is the latter that puts wind in the sails of nincompoops like Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Cortez. It is the idea that a tiny few live off the endeavours of the majority and that only the government, using force, can restore a just equity to the world. The problem is, that it was only the force used by governments that made possible the leeches that live off the labour of honest toilers in the first place.
The real truth is that it is the genuine one percent that brought our civilization to its 19th century zenith. It is only through their efforts that the rest of us get to enjoy their creations; be it in music, literature, medical breakthroughs, kitchenware, espresso machines, cars, plentiful energy etc. Every invention, whether seemingly small, or large, sums up to the sophisticated lifestyle that we enjoy today.
The world owes that one percent a thank you that it can never properly give. We are indebted to them.
The problem is not, and never has been, the one percent or, ‘the elite’, as they are even more disdainfully called. The problem is governments that totally control our money (even to determining what can be used for money and what the interest rates are) and, in doing so, enable the leeches to rise to the top and pass themselves off as the one percent.
All of us, including governments, live off the genius and flow-down riches of the real one percent. Far from vilifying, we should venerate them. We would still be using stone hammers were it not for the one-percenters.