Not all wealthy have plundered underclasses
On Monday, Oxfam released its annual report on a state of affairs that it alternately described as “obscene” and “beyond grotesque.”
It’s not exploitative labour practices. It’s not monopolistic market control. It’s not even oligarchical cronyism. No, Oxfam wrote a report denouncing the mere existence of people that it deems to be too rich.
Specifically, in a 48- page report this week, the nonprofit made the claim that “just 8 men own ( the) same wealth as half the world.” Mark Goldring, chief executive of Oxfam GB, told British media that the report is proof that a “super- rich elite are able to prosper at the expense of the rest of us.” Oxfam’s argument would all make perfect sense in a world governed by feudalism.
In medieval England the guy in the castle did indeed get his extra wealth by shaking down the surrounding peasantry. Same deal with Fidel Castro (a fan of Oxfam reports, incidentally). El Comandante’s yacht and vast estate surely have something to do with him wetting his beak in the treasury of the totalitarian workers’ paradise.
But globally, poverty continues to plummet. Between 2012 and 2013 alone, 100 million people were lifted out of “extreme poverty” — what the World Bank defines as living on less than US$1.90 a day. Hunger is also in free fall. In developing countries, only 12.9 per cent are undernourished, compared to 23.3 per cent in 1990.
How can this be if cigarchomping plutocrats are stealing all our money?
First, there’s the simple fact that Oxfam has some terrible accountants ( a particularly worrying state of affairs for a charity). As financial journalist Felix Salmon points out, the charity routinely calculates wealth by tallying assets and subtracting liabilities. This means that anybody whose mortgage outweighs their assets is counted as having negative wealth, and thus ranks as poorer than a debt- free subsistence farmer in subSaharan Africa.
The perverse result is that, in Oxfam’s 2013 report, 7.5 per cent of the world’s poorest lived in the U. S. Donald Trump, leveraged up to his eyeballs, once famously pointed out a homeless man to his daughter Ivanka and said, “That guy has $8 billion more than me.” But according to Oxfam, Trump was absolutely right. At that particular moment, Trump was 10 figures in debt.
And Oxfam is clearly worried that the situation is getting worse. Two years ago, it took 85 billionaires to equal the wealth of the world’s bottom 50 per cent. Now, it takes eight — a sign that “income and wealth are being sucked upwards at an alarming rate.”
In the halcyon days of 1987, by contrast, the world’s richest man was Japan’s Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, who held an inflation- adjusted fortune of US$16 billion. That’s not even close to the US$ 40- billion threshold that it would take today to get into Oxfam’s top eight today.
To Oxfam, things were apparently better in those good ol’ days. Of course, 1987 was also when one- third of the globe lived in the “extreme poverty” of less than the 2016 equivalent of US$ 1.90 per day. That rate today is now less than 10 per cent, despite an extra two billion mouths to feed.
Meanwhile, the Oxfam Eight make up an absurd list of billionaires for anyone trying to convince the world that rich people are rapacious exploiters of the poor. At No. 1, with US$ 75 billion, is Bill Gates. He made his billions through bringing computing to the global masses, not levelling rainforests or abusing cheap labour. Now, before he dies, he’s on a quest to funnel his entire fortune into the world’s poorest areas.
No. 3 is Warren Buffett, who has pledged to surrender 99 per cent of his fortune to charity upon his death. His Berkshire Hathaway investment company has also invested US$17 billion in renewable energy since 2004. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who is now pouring capital into everything from space travel to health research to journalism, is in the top five, too.
But most i mportantly, where are the robber barons and the rapacious colonialists on this list?
Where’s Henry Clay Frick, the U. S. industrialist who sent private armies to do battle with striking workers? Where’s Belgium’s Leopold II, who turned the Congo into his own personal slave empire?
Those are the kinds of men you need, Oxfam.
I nstead, y our list is gummed up with all these innovative philanthropic jobcreators.
It’s not all by- the- bootstraps philanthropic capitalism, of course. List member Carlos Slim Helu, for one, controls such a vast share of the Mexican economy that he is able to stifle criticism with the threat of divestment. The holder of Oxfam’s No. 2 spot, clothing magnate Amancio Ortega, has faced allegations of hiring subcontractors with exploitative and unsafe work practices.
Problems like these are indeed mentioned in the report, but only as symptoms that will magically disappear once we impose Oxfam’s utopian vision for a strict, income- capped “human economy.” The report reads: “It is simple common sense that having all this money in too few hands is harmful to our society and to our future.”
Buffett has emerged in recent years as a vocal spokesman for higher taxes on rich people like himself. Gates has said much of the same, even denouncing the conservative argument that prosperity and high taxes cannot coexist. What Gates and Buffett do not do, however, is peddle Oxfam’s simplistic neo-Marxist conspiracy theory that anybody with money must have stolen it from the poor.