Hi Beth. The story you commented on was duplicated with https://medium.com/thrive-global/are-you-an-oligarch-or-a-serf-bce98e048edf . I deleted the duplicate, but got your response to the other title. Thanks for writing.
The question of who owns the earth, the land and resources, such as water, oil, minerals, etc., is a matter of belief, Faith and philosophy. Some believe God owns it all and we are stewards, assigned the task of management. As stewards, we either do a good job, with justice and wisdom, or a bad job, with evil and blasphemy.
Some believed in the divine right of kings and that God made certain people earthly lords, and only they and their family own everything. They even believed they owned the other people, slaves. What the slaves made with their labors belonged to the royalty too.
Some early civilizations, tribes, believed that everything was owned by the tribe and a chief or council of elders made up the rules about who did what and how the resources were distributed. The idea that a person owns the land was silly. It made as much sense as a squirrel or a deer owning it. It all belongs to God or the tribe in common, and they try to figure out how to be fair with it.
Societies make up rules about who has rights to various properties, such as lands, natural resources, the product of labor, and privileges to community resources. They make up rules of how the creation of community resources such as armies, police, transportation, government, utilities, etc.is funded. These are the laws they make. Some of these societies are democratic and some are not.
You may think you own whatever has come under your control by the laws that have existed up to this day, but that is what King Louis XVI thought too. In a dictatorship, you have the right to control what the dictator says you can control. But in America, you don’t get to dictate. In America, you have a right to control what the laws say. And the laws change in America as they need to to establish justice, in the mind of of the democracy.
Today, we have a situation where 26 people on the earth control (own) as much as all the rest of the 7 billion combined. They didn’t work for it. It is wealth created by the work of others. They are like the royalty of the feudal days. Do you think that is just? Is it right for this wealth to be left as an inheritance to children who have done nothing? Is that your idea of justice?
The oligarchs, the kings, the 26, have gotten control of our government and have made a mess of it for years. They have convinced a lot of people that their puppets are working for the “forgotten man”, but it’s a lie. Incredibly, they have convinced middle-class people, with less than $100,000 net worth, that their tax laws, with big tax cuts for the wealthy, are good for these middle-class people. They’ve convinced many and that tax reform, like high inheritance taxes on estates of over $10 million, will hurt them. Crazy, yes?
It’s time for them to get dethroned, like Louis XVI. Vote them out.
