If the ultra rich have embezzled, extorted, and siphoned of all a society’s gains…what’s left to pay for everyone’s healthcare, education, and retirement? And so on.
Did the wealthy use up all of the doctors, nurses, hospitals, teachers and schools? You, of all people, should understand the roles of resources and money in economics. The money is only a unit of measure that allows us to quantify the relative values of resources. We can no more run out of money than we can run out of inches or miles. I can buy up all of the tickets for my favorite performer, but I can only listen to them from one seat at one time for my investment. All of the available tickets gave me no more advantage than buying one ticket except a less crowded venue.
As long as we stay stuck in the feudalism of gold standard thinking about wealth and money the longer it will take us to reach above the state of serfdom. This, of course, massively benefits those who make money from their money, not their labor, and the political minions they employ to provide them an advantage. Using your voice to declare that the wealthy used up all of the money so we can’t have nice things, like a habitable planet, places you in the company of those minions. The best way to deal with the wealthy is to make them irrelevant to our goals.
The founders of America gave us the first fiat currency when they mandated Congress to coin it “for the common welfare” in Article 1: Section 8 of the American Constitution. The gold standard meant to limit that authority was the doing of the wealthy and bankers, and we have struggled ever since to throw off the rules and purposes of that ever since. But we did it in 1934 for the domestic economy, and for the world in 1971 when Nixon removed us from the Bretton-Woods Agreement. Since then, the US dollar, as well as many other nations’ currencies, have been a no-cost commodity to Congress that is mandated to use it to shape the economy, limited only by the availability of resources and labor.
The ruling class has distracted attention from this reality with fear mongering over our debt (which isn’t debt at all) and politicians admonishing us of the dire consequences of not paying sufficient homage to the god of the balanced budget (a 100% tax rate). The truth is that we cannot use the economy to balance the budget and attempting to do so via austerity and taxation only makes us worse off. “ANY” suffering in a modern economy that can be mitigated with money is strictly a political decision, not economics.
We can “afford” to purchase anything that is for sale priced in dollars, including the labor the private sector rejects, and at a livable wage with fewer hours and better benefits. Just anchoring the economy in labor again with a guarantee of such a job at the discretion of the worker, would be huge in improving our society and allow the people the luxury of the higher level of thought and concern, above the bottom of the pyramid of needs where our most base instincts rule and tyrants are elected, needed to understand and defeat climate change.
