The Trouble With Artificial Economic Scarcity

Some of the hyper-rich, i.e. the upper 1 percent of the U.$. population that possesses 40 percent of the nation's wealth, as reported by Howard Zinn, are undoubtedly intelligent, hard-working, and, with the exception of their congenital blindness to the suffering artificial scarcity imposes on the working class, decent people, but as a whole the country club class can be classified as an enemy of rationality. It is not rational that the assets of this society are distributed in such a way that 47 million people have zero health insurance, resulting in an estimated 18,000 unnecessary deaths a year, according to press reports, and pushing the federal government toward bankruptcy. Wealth in this country needs to be redistributed via the tax code -- but that would require elected officials who are not funded by the hyper-rich, which is never going to happen without campaign finance reform that would enact public funding of all federal elections. Artificial scarcity exists to a large degree because of the enormous concentration of assets in that narrow, uppermost 1 percent, causing the rest of the members of society to fight among themselves in fierce competition for the remaining assets, this competition leading them to overlook the fact that the working class as a whole is being ripped off to an almost unbelievable extent.