We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.
In a capitalist society there are always inequalities of class and wealth. People who inherit money and property will always see themselves as being superior to those who have to work for it.
People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.
This economy continually generates extremes of wealth and poverty, and whenever you have large numbers of people who have been kept from meaningful labor, those in power are not interested in educating them. Why do they want to have highly educated, unemployed, angry people?
If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.
A rather vicious cycle has been at work for years. Reduced taxes on the rich leave them with more money to influence politicians and politics. Their influence wins them further tax reductions, which gives them still more money to put to political use. When the loss of tax revenue from the rich worsens already-strained government budgets, the rich press politicians to cut public services and government jobs and not even debate a return to the higher taxes the rich used to pay.
What I have here is a complete indictment of our present-day society, our whole world. What’s wrong with it is money, honey, money.
A poor person who is unhappy is better off than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope, he thinks that money would help.
Worries are the most stubborn habits in the world. Even after a poor man has won a huge lottery prize, he will still for months wake up in the night with a start, worrying about food and rent.
Remember the poor; it costs nothing.
The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, taking to the streets, picking up weapons, and inventing a new poetry.
I may drive a twenty-year-old car, and I may live in a crappy neighborhood, but I feel like I’m one of the richest persons around, and nobody can take that away from me, because when you have that foundation and that sense of who you are and what you can do, even if everything’s stripped away from you, your spirit, and your love, and your drive simply cannot be taken away.
So often in America we have socialism for the rich and rugged, free-enterprise capitalism for the poor.
I take as a point of departure the possibility and desirability of a fundamentally different form of society — call it communism, if you will — in which men and women, freed from the pressures of scarcity and from the insecurity of everyday existence under capitalism, shape their own lives. Collectively they decide who, how, when, and what shall be produced.
Do you not know that God entrusted you with that money (all above what buys necessities for your families) to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to help the stranger, the widow, the fatherless; and, indeed, as far as it will go, to relieve the wants of all mankind?
If 10 percent of the population were to take a consciously ethical outlook on life and act accordingly, the resulting change would be more significant than any change of government.
