Wednesday, February 23, 2005
(4:42 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Wealth
What are the basic necessities of life? How much more than that does one have to have before one counts as "wealthy"? In a previous post, I asserted that I consider being wealthy immoral, and yet my position as a white, middle class American citizen makes it very difficult to avoid either hypocrisy or a self-serving definition of wealth.I'll try an initial listing of necessities:
- Food and water
- Clothing
- Housing
- Medical care
- Transportation
- Social interaction
- Communication
- Education
- Aesthetic enjoyment
So should I sell my vehicle (which was given to me as a gift) and give the proceeds to the poor? If I am accepted to a graduate program with full funding, should I decline the honor and ask that the money be given to a promising inner-city student who otherwise could not afford college? Should I sell my cell phone (given to me for free with the plan) and buy phone cards for poor families? What if the cell phone plan is the cheapest phone plan I can get? Would these equations change at all if I knew 100% for sure that I would be living in Chicago for the next several years rather than in a more suburban or rural area (and thus that I wouldn't need to buy another car within a year, wouldn't have easy access to pay phones any longer, etc.)?
I'm asking here, for real. I try to buy durable things that will last a long time so as not to contribute to consumerism (hence the more-expensive Bose radio instead of a succession of disposable, shitty CD players whose cost would probably have added up to the same cost as the Bose itself over the number of years I've had it). But do I need a CD player at all? Or how about my huge number of books? Or the CDs I never listen to? Or...
The frustration about this discussion is twofold:
- No matter what I conclude here, I seriously doubt my behaviors are going to change in any serious way.
- I feel like this soul-searching by a jobless grad student (or, if applicable, a working stiff browsing this page) is somewhat ridiculous when there are many, many people out there who could single-handedly feed an entire nation, for a generation, and yet they just sit on their capital so that it can collect more capital, even though they could never even begin to make direct use of that money themselves in their lifetime or in the lifetime of twenty generations of descendants. I know there is always an instinctive "healer, heal thyself" thing whereby if I say Bill Gates should give away his fortune, I will immediately be cornered and ask why I don't reduce myself to indigence -- but I really do think that Bill Gates's wealth (or Dick Cheney's, or whoever else's) is so much more morally problematic that the comparison is obscene.
UPDATE: Even more frustrating is that I'm treating this as an arbitrary "moral" issue when really the problem is that certain people hording possessions is directly tied to other people being deprived. Not all of us can live like Donald Trump, and the evidence points to a necessary connection between children starving to death and a limited number of people being able to live like Donald Trump -- so I say, no more Donald Trumps, period. Whatever end is served by the massive starvation that happens every day on earth -- "motivating people to work," "rewarding those who are talented and inventive," or whatever else -- cannot possibly be worth the cost.
Feel free to mock my empty idealism, which will certainly be destroyed once I enter the adult world, in the comment box below.
