The world has never been
richer, technologically developed, literate and full of resources as of this
moment, yet we see rampant poverty among us with millions of people struggling
to make their ends meet. One wonders why in the age when we are close to curing
cancer, funding explorations into finding suitable resources for settling on
other planets, we see so much disparity of wealth among our fellow human beings.
To understand the mechanism that has been adopted by modern economies we must go
back to the cold war era, the USSR and the USA have been fighting for global
dominance for a long time now, the main point of contention between the two was
the ideology that would rule the world for centuries to come, the USSR being a
communist country believed in the socialism approach where the state own
everything and community as a whole control every mean of production thus
stopping the disparity, on the other hand the USA believed in the ideology of
capitalism where businesses and people compete together for their own betterment
in an open market, though capitalism had some perks over socialism, according to
economists it was meant only for a time but we have seen after the soviet
collapse in the 1990s the capitalist system has been adopted by almost every
country in the world. What the " evil " of capitalism has led to is an income
and wealth disparity that is unparalleled, according to a survey 50% of the
worlds wealth is controlled by only 1% of its population, no doubt that the
elite have been able to provide better education, better resources and
experience to their children and thus keeping the fortunes circulating within
their own families further dividing the gap between the poor and rich, as Robert
Kiyosaki says poverty can thus even be inherited and so can be richness, what's
really disturbing is the fact that even our institutions which are supposed to
provide welfare to the people by increasing their standard of living have been
designed for the favor of the rich, our educational system ( the best of it )
can only be afforded by the rich, our healthcare, even our banks give huge loans
to the wealthy because they have a higher probability of returning them, not to
mention the fact that many elite have used the various financial instruments
available in the market to their benefit which also requires huge amount of
capital to begin with. It feels like everything in our economic system is built
to make the richer more rich and to keep the working class and the poor at their
place and at the mercy of the elite.
the government tries to eliminate poverty and make peoples standard of living
higher but what if the system is at flaw, what if we all are living in denial of
a system that has been designed to keep us where we are for the benefit of a few
at the expense of many. it is a question i leave to ponder upon and to find a
system where we can provide REAL opportunities and real assets for people to
make their lives better.