Call me a weirdo but I strongly believe that capitalism should change to something more modern. I mean we’ve been there for probably 100 years now and I can’t really see a huge improvement to the society. More and more reports emerge that a very few people own as much money as the majority of the world. The numbers are staggering but most importantly – they’re broadcasted widely. I seem like we all drive ourselves to the same goal – more and more money.
I’ve been there too. As a young person, I earned way more than I should. I jumped into that rat race competition and I was winning. A weekend in Paris wasn’t crazy (despite still keeping the cost down). But partially that what led me to leave Poland and move to New Zealand – to change my lifestyle. The thing is that the more money you have the more temptations you have but most importantly the more social pressure you have.
Take a person who earns a lot (if you think it’s about you, it’s probably about you 🙂 ). They earn a lot, their partner earns a lot, they have a nice small 2 bedroom house with a mortgage and they buy another big and brand new house. Now they’re over $1m in debt just because they want comfortable living. Except that 3 out of their 4 bedroom house are empty. Now, don’t get me wrong. You do with your money whatever you want. But you can’t really deny that if you got this promotion for an important person in a business, you need to be dressed better, you need to have a better car and a better house because people will look at you “weirdly”. You can’t imagine a director of a corpo driving a 20 years Toyota Corolla, can you?
The thing is that money change people no matter what you say. If you have little, you spend little. If you have more you spend more. Fair enough. But where’s the limit? You see the capitalism opened this pandora box of no limits. Mr Bezos, Amazon’s owner has recently broken a barrier of owning more than $100 billion dollars. One hundred billion dollars. Why? Why the hell one individual would own that much? Where’s the logic I mean he can buy a country himself. Another one, Mr Facebook how I call Zuckenberg – he pledged to donate the majority of his wealth to the charity. In the end, he’s got billions too. Except he donates in millions annually which is a small percentage and he’ll donate the rest “before he dies”. Well, that’s great – it means that you need your billions just in case if there’s a ticket to Mars or something or what?
The problem is that this greed lesson does come from the top and flows to the bottom. Those people, with a very little exceptions, lead a very lustful life on yachts that are wallpapered with stingray skins and door handles made of gold and they fly their private planes to see a sunrise or… just fly to sing on a plane to post on Youtube channel (you know who I mean). And all of us poor people only dream about it. But by dreaming we desire, we want it, we want to have that power of doing whatever we want whenever we want. So the circle closes because once one of us poor buggers get the money we’re joining a club of spenders and detached people.
I love seeing all those social media posts from the Royal family or celebrities with poor African children. Quick snap, smile, let’s go back to the Hilton hotel. The perception we’re building is so fake and so naive that we’re separating ourselves more and more. South American’s and many other nations’ equality protests have already shown it – it’s us and them. Us, people trying to get by and them doing whatever they want.
What can change? I don’t know, I’m sure there’s a lot of smart economists that can come up with a solution. What if there was a “wealth limit”. Once you reach an obscure wealth, the rest of the money becomes money invested in the world. Whether it’s $10 million or $100 million, doesn’t matter, in case of the Amazon’s Owner, it would still be $99 billion left that he would be forced to use in planting trees, help refugees or even clean the oceans.
We’re exploiting our planet at extreme speed and the resources are very limited. Sooner or later we’ll run out and we’ll have only humans with money that can have food and people without that will be left to die. But how about the plan for the year 2500 and create a system that will allow the planet to survive, treat the humans equally and environment like it’s everyone’s home. I don’t mean to create a very social system because, in the end, some people work harder, some people don’t work at all. But surely we all breathe the same oxygen and require a similar amount of calories a day so how come some people are 100,000 better than others?