It turns out that today, as soon as I opened the Internet browser on my cell phone, I came across a very interesting documentary about the rich and the distribution of wealth.
Image Source
A Wrong Look at Wealth
The documentary, which was from a cable channel, talked about who are the richest in the world (the world's billionaires), the amounts of money they had, and how they flaunted it; and also said that the rich tried to pay what less possible in taxes.
The documentary interviews several of the world's richest personalities: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates among many others. I'm not going to summarize what each and every one of them said, but I will tell you about what a couple of them said: Elon Musk (owner of Tesla and Twitter) and Jeff Bezos (owner of Amazon).
Elon Musk basically said that he worked between 100 or more hours a week and that you have to be able to work very hard to have a fortune like his. And Jeff Bezos said that basically Amazon has created huge numbers of jobs over the years, thereby helping to create more wealth in the world, and that was why he believed that capitalism was the means to solve the great problems of humanity.
But none of this seemed to matter to the documentary's narrator, who questioned or called into question everything that millionaires argued for wealth and capitalism. After interviewing several of the richest in the world, the narrator contrasted their fortunes with the reality of the most disadvantaged in society, and with the enormous poverty suffered by most of the population worldwide. Clearly, I could see from the beginning, there was an ideological bias in the aforementioned documentary (I could sense that it had a socialist-communist tinge); but I continued viewing it to see if it had at least something valid to argue the points of view that was holding the narrator.
The serious mistake is that the video took a look at the wealth, and then at the proportion of poverty in the world, and seeing the enormous gap or disproportion that exists between the two, began to criticize the lifestyle of the rich and the fact that they had enormous fortunes that they could not spend in several whole lives, while so many millions of people in the world suffer from the most extreme poverty, suffering from deprivations and without being able to cover their most basic needs.
While the documentary was partly right about some things, the essential problem is that it was taking the wrong look at wealth. Because wealth is not the problem; poverty is the problem; and criticizing the rich for having huge, self-earned fortunes is simply not the way to combat poverty, because it don't solve nothing at all.
And that is where the worst part of the documentary came from, coupled with the fact that it made it very clear that 46% of the world's economic wealth is concentrated in the hands of just 1% of the population (which is true) highlighted the fact that billionaires try, by all possible legal means, to pay as little tax as possible. The second is also partially true, but what does not allow the public to understand is that the States do not tax the rich more because they are the ones that generate jobs, more wealth and the companies that are the engine of the countries' economies.
The incorrect look at wealth is given by not understanding that the basis of all the progress that humanity has experienced in recent centuries is capitalism, money. And what makes the incorrect view of wealth worse is problematizing the existence of billionaires, making them see themselves as the culprits of a poverty problem that is not really their fault, but rather the enormous complexity of economic systems per se.
Image Source
To say that wealth is the problem is to create a fallacy, because poverty is not generated because the rich do not want to pay taxes, nor does it exist because of the rich. Poverty is the opposite pole of wealth, and as such, it is not generated because others have or do not have wealth; It is simply not sensible to tell poor people that they are poor because the rich have taken the wealth that should be theirs; On the contrary, it is a fallacious and dangerous argument that left-wing politicians have used many times (and continue to use) to win the vote and support of the masses in order to come to power and entrench themselves in endless corruption schemes that they do not solve poverty in the end.
Left-wing politicians say they want to end poverty, but on the contrary, all what they do is perpetuate it, because they only seek to control everything, put everything in the hands of the state and find guilties and excuses for the problems that already exist and for those that they themselves they generate due to their own ineptitude. Left-wing politicians fallaciously argue things that make many people think that the rich are the real problem of the countries and that they should not exist, when in reality, they are not the problem; in fact, most of them are simply people who learned to make fortunes in circumstances where most people put little effort and settle for little or nothing.
The erroneous view of the documentary is even deeper, because they implied that wealth had to be eliminated so that poverty would cease to exist. And no, you can't just eliminate poverty by eliminating wealth; because with this, you would eliminate both, therefore it is simply a fallacious and useless thesis.
And if you eliminate wealth and only the poor remain, then the problem would be even greater, because there would be many more poor people worldwide. The correct approach should be to eliminate poverty, so that there are more rich; not the opposite.
Distributing wealth would end poverty
But the cherry on top of the ice cream (of the documentary I saw), is that it said that the state should be in charge of distributing the wealth of the rich among the poor, in such a way as to combat poverty.
Image Source
And exhaustively the narrator spoke of combating poverty, not ending it, because it seems that he knew or intuited that poverty as a phenomenon and scourge is impossible to completely eradicate. However, the solution proposed by the documentary was that the state should, based on the wealth of the millionaires, give a kind of one-time bonus (of $50,000) to people from poor strata so that they could create companies of value and wealth.
As crazy as it sounds, I sensed right away that the narrator had hit a wall with his own arguments, and he didn't even realize it. He basically arrived at the key to the matter without even realizing it, because what he was suggesting, although it seems logical, humane and sensible, is the opposite, that is, it is totally false and useless.
Because you can give $100 to a rich man, and he will turn it into millions of dollars, but you can give $100,000,000 to a poor man and in a few months, weeks or days he will be submerged in the same level of poverty. This shows us that the essential problem that causes poverty is the lack of a productive mentality.
Therefore, it is not logical, healthy, useful, effective or productive to take money from those who have more, to give it to those who have nothing. Giving money to the masses was simply never the solution to anything, because instead of giving anything to the people, what the governments of the countries need is to create an environment where people can earn their own money and financially wellness.
Cryptocurrencies in the creation of wealth
To create wealth, people need to understand the nature of money and wealth, people need to acquire a productive mindset, and they need to take responsibility for their own financial situation. Because when people understand that it is not the fault of the government in power (whether of the left or right ideology) that they are economically poor, that is when they begin to act positively and effectively to combat the poverty from the exact point where they should start fighting it, that is, from the base itself, from mentality and action.
In this sense, cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, HIVE and many others) are helping to create wealth in the world, but not only from the very fact of serving as a basis for investment and trading (nor for productive projects of diverse nature), but for the fact to change the very mentality of the people around the money and wealth.
Image Source
Cryptocurrency has allowed people to understand that money is important, and that having it is something positive, which allows more money to be produced through productivity. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have also allowed the world to understand that money is something personal, that it should not be issued disproportionately because this is precisely what has unbalanced most world economies through crises (economic recession and inflation).
And cryptocurrencies have made it possible to remove the control of states and governments from the financial equation of wealth. Simply, now you can make transactions, fund transfers, regardless of governments, banking systems and third parties, which in turn allows you to eliminate border borders, transfer limits and high fees.
But it is precisely because of this that cryptocurrencies have the most of world governments as enemy, which are trying to control or ban them at every step they take. But they will not be able to, because cryptocurrencies have allowed people to awaken something called wealth consciousness.
When you understand the nature of wealth, then you will never be poor again, nor will you blame governments for your lack of liquidity, on the contrary, you will know that you have to work hard to get the wealth you want and deserve.
In summary
The documentary that I saw really has a lot of weaknesses in terms of its vision of wealth and poverty. Quite frankly, poverty is something that will not be totally eliminated by any means or by any action, because it is individuals who have to become financially conscious and aware of what wealth is; in order to move on to the actions that will actually allow them to get out of poverty.
Image Source
So it is a problem of mentality, of conscience and of knowing and understanding that wealth is not a problem, but poverty, but mental poverty. Wealth can only be produced with a lot of intelligence and vision, and this intelligence and vision is what we must fight day after day to create and strengthen in ourselves.
Because when we understand the nature of poverty and wealth, we will never again be financially poor. So no, distributing the wealth of the richest among the poorest has not been, is not and never will be the solution to poverty, let's understand it once and for all.
What do you think about the topic discussed? Please comment.
Gif created by
