We were visiting friends at a lakeside cabin in Michigan, four of us seated around a table near the water on hard steel chairs. Mary had two cushions under her tush and I had none.
I asked her whether she could share one of her cushions, and she readily consented.
As she sat back down, she exclaimed, “Wow, it’s amazing how much difference one cushion makes!”
I replied, “Yes it is!”
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Look, I come here not to wag my finger at the basics of capitalism. I’m all in on the profit motive, the spirit of competition, and the value of hard work to improve one’s lot in life. Winston Churchill’s famous quote about democracy—that it is “the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried”—could just as readily be applied to the capitalist economic system, with but one proviso: that it should be a life-affirming version that lifts all boats, rather than the aggressive and decadent, “I’d better sink your boat before you sink mine” form that is currently being encouraged and enabled by the political class currently in power in the United States.
And while we’re at it, we should remind ourselves that ‘living below the poverty line’ is a socio-economic euphemism for being desperate, hungry, and ill-clothed.
It’s not really a complex matter, especially in a country with a high percentage of purportedly religious residents whose faiths almost uniformly preach the virtues of assisting the poor and resisting the evils of greed. To wit: Why are we not finding it unacceptable, intolerable, morally indefensible and a crime against humanity, that in the richest, most “successful” economy in the history of the world, millions of its citizens go to bed hungry at night, and often don’t sleep in a bed at all?
Why are we as a people, via the government we share in common, not implementing a living wage for everyone working a job, and guaranteeing adequate food, shelter and health care to everyone who needs it?
“The world has enough for everyone’s needs, but not everyone’s greed,” said Mahatma Gandhi, tacking a nice rhyme scheme onto the cushion parable above. Nowhere is this more true than in the United States. Despite its unprecedented number of billionaires and multi-millionaires, it stands out among our 195-member nations on earth as No. 6 in the rogue’s gallery of worst income inequality.
Two charts tell the tale.
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So, snugly on top with the most millionaires and billionaires, and the second highest “average” wealth behind only the special case of the small, homogenous financial behemoth of Switzerland. Good news, right?
Not by a long shot.
Because those stats don’t account for the anomaly of America having the second highest average wealth and the sixth worst income disparity, which is strange and shouldn’t happen, but for this one nettlesome fact: all the billionaires and millionaires artificially inflate the average. In reality, the 11.1% of the population living below the poverty line adds up to 36.8 million people in the latest U.S Census data from 2023.
And while we’re at it, we should remind ourselves that “living below the poverty line” is a socio-economic euphemism for being desperate, hungry, and ill-clothed. When we tag those adjectives onto nearly 37 million of our fellow Americans, how on earth can we ever justify lowering taxes on anyone above that poverty line, not to mention on the ultra-wealthy, who always gain the most from tax cuts and therefore shrink the public coffers that could otherwise be used to keep more people above that line?
Why give the wealthy yet another pillow when the poor must endure hard ground?
Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard the narrative: Those billionaires have worked hard and come up with genius ideas, and they employ a lot of people and they deserve what they get! So suck it up, all you ne’er-do-wells, just ditch the phone, turn off the TV, and get your sorry asses off the couch and onto work!
Here’s the problem—besides the fact that up to 12 million of those below the poverty line are the working poor. People are born with different gifts, challenges and capacities. Some greater, some lesser.
Meaning that your genetic endowment, which you had nothing to do with, determines a great deal—not all, but a great deal—of your success (or lack of it) in life. Then you add the environment you grew up in. Loving, skillful parents, comfortable home, good schools? What a jackpot you have struck!
So if you pile some good hard work on those endowments and go on to accomplish something meaningful and financially rewarding, congratulations, and good on ya. But in the name of all that is human and humane, should society then pay you so much and tax you so little that millions of your fellow citizens who may not have been blessed with those advantages, who may work just as hard, under much more physically demanding conditions, have to live hand-to-mouth?
Should we abide such radically disparate outcomes in the roulette wheel that so much of life entails? Simply throw up our hands and say there is nothing we can do?
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Ultimately, dog-eat-dog capitalism—where the wealthy buy off politicians with campaign contributions and hire enough lobbyists and accountants to keep their taxes to a minimum and their money away from the poor—sees all of life as a competition, and every living thing as a competitor in a fight for more and more of the spoils of society.
In order to justify the inherent cruelty such a view entails, it comes to regard the have-nots as sub-human, living, in a certain president’s memorable phrase, in “shit-hole countries” and neighborhoods, no more evolved than pigs jostling for food scraps around a trough, or lions downing a wildebeest and proceeding to feast.
But it requires no great moral genius to see where such a view leads. Aggressive capitalism without a moral compass, without “a human face,” in the late Czech Republic president and playwright Václav Havel’s words, degrades everyone: the rich, the middle class and the poor alike.
No one wins when our fellow humans do not enjoy the basic dignity and value every person deserves, and no good will come of the radically tiered system we have devised in which the wealthy have all the pillows they could ever want while the poor squat numbly on cement.
It’s un-Christian, un-Judaic, un-Islamic, and unhealthy. We are not on the savannah scrounging out another day at the expense of some available prey. There is enough food, money, blankets and pillows to go around. If it does not, the moral rot of that failing will eventually doom us all.
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Well said my friend. Looking forward to seeing you when you return.
Thanks, pal; there will be tales beyond these to tell…
Love your line “We are not on the savannah scrounging out another day at the expense of some available prey.” Lions love the gnu.
The income inequality, while always a thread in the quilt of American capitalism, has dramatically worsened in this 21st century. Frightfully so. Is it fair that a person earning above $175,900 no longer pays a social security tax? Is it fair that billionaire Warren Buffett has a lower tax rate than his secretary? Buffett’s did rightfully acknowledge its unjustifiability; he said, “If this is a war, my side has the nuclear bomb? Even Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, the so-called bible of capitalism, considered the real wealth of a country not be measured in the amount of gold in king’s treasury or the massive moolah lying in the holdings of the extremely affluent but rather the income of “the laboring poor.” In a New Media interview Milton Friedman, the guru of Reaganomics, admitted, “In the particular problem of inequality, what is true, what is unquestionably true, is that there’s been a widening difference in wages earned. You have had the skilled wages go up relative to the unskilled wages.”
On a very personal level, do you have any idea what a family of four now pays to watch a baseball game at the Green Monster (synecdoche for Boston’s Fenway Park)? A monstrous $250! That’s a tough pill to swallow for any middle incomer, especially for baseball zealots like myself. Do you know how much money the Red Sox made last year? $575 million! The blame doesn’t rest entirely with the ownership, or does it? Zach Wheeler, the star pitcher of the Phillies, earned $300,000/inning last year, equivalent to $20,000/pitch! Well, let me think about this for a second, who’s responsible for paying Wheeler’s obscene salary? John Middleton, the Phillies’ billionaire owner, who inherited millions from his family’s tobacco industry. I guess there’s a lot of truth to that old adage “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.”
Robert, fairness went out the window so long ago in the American economy that if we were to look at it scientifically, we are headed toward humans being added to the endangered species list! And that’s not even taking into account the effects of climate change. In the end, life will be unsustainable on both fronts—social inequality ultimately begetting a violent uprising if climate catastrophe doesn’t take us first. Can we bring about needed change fast enough?
Hey Drew, Love your cushion parable. What strikes me most is not just the cruelty of imbalance, but our cultural estrangement from the very concept of balance itself. We live in a nation that once prided itself on checks and balances, on the idea that no branch of government, no individual, no ideology should dominate. Yet today, imbalance is not an accident—it’s a design. Wealth pools at the top, truth is drowned in noise, and the democratic promise of an equal voice is muffled by greed of media forums. And why have we abandoned balance?
In Nature we extract without replenishing. Forests fall, oceans warm, species vanish. The balance between consumption and stewardship has been bulldozed by short-term profit.
In Wealth, as you note, the richest country in history tolerates hunger and homelessness. We’ve mistaken meritocracy for moral license, forgetting that luck and privilege often masquerade as “hard work.”
In Mind and Health, anxiety, loneliness and burnout are endemic. We medicate symptoms but ignore the inbalance that is at the root of it. We ignore the societal imbalance between productivity and rest, competition and connection.
In Democracy, Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and corporate lobbying have tipped the scales. The ideal of “one person, one vote” is now a quaint relic, replaced by “one dollar, one megaphone.”
And yet, ideologies that center balance—Taoism, Buddhism, Indigenous wisdom, even the Founders’ vision of democratic equilibrium—are dismissed as impractical, naïve, or “un-American.” Why? Because balance requires restraint. It asks the powerful to share, the loud to listen, the fast to slow down. And in a culture addicted to acceleration and accumulation, restraint feels like defeat.
But it’s not. It’s survival. It’s dignity. It’s the only way forward.
Your call for humane capitalism is a call for rebalancing. Not just the economy, but our values. Let’s not just add more cushions to the steel chairs of society. Oh, and by the way, my old band, Rock and Rica, always played Fortunate Son. I wish more musicians would start producing protest songs.
Great little essay, Kirk. I’m glad to see it added as a kind of Chapter 2 extension-elaboration of my remarks above it. Your take on “ideologies that center balance” is spot-on and especially relevant when so much appears to be out of balance in our economy (like, for starters, the DEBT!) and larger world.