If you think about the world economy as a problem in maximizing status rewards for the rich, a lot of seemingly paradoxical elements fall into place.
We tend to think of solving the world's problems where X is set as "Minimizing Suffering" and then we can't figure out what's preventing that from happening.
If we set X as "Maximizing Comfort for the Already Rich" then the wars and wild economic fluctuations make sense: harvesting the output of the non-rich.
Hat tip to xaxodo for the idea.
Hidden in the babble of the TV explainers of "economics" is their own self-interest in keeping stock, bond, real estate and gold purchasing and selling operations secret, because these operations have a purpose and function: (as Kurt Vonnegut explained in one of his books) To transfer money back and forth and take a cut every time it does.
It doesn't get simpler than that, and it doesn't need to. Every time you are listening to some wrinkle-browed talking head explaining how the market works, and you can't quite follow it? It's not your fault.
Just like Jesuit or Muslim theology, the job of the explainer is for you to feel like they know something you don't, and to hide what really matters.
What really matters is this: there is plenty for all, but not riches for all, so those who wish to be rich must take from the others.
The satisfying distance between the rich and poor is the result, and as long as the poor are fooled, then their greater numbers avail them not.
Democracy is a fake, a nostrum, designed to look like people have the right to even things out.
Public relations is how that ideal is reversed: the purpose of the media is to keep you convinced that the world is the best it can be, and that
it is necessary for some to be rich in order for the economy to function
.
People must be taught to accept that if they believe it, they will get rich too. It isn't possible, but neither is a consumer standard of living for ten billion people.
People fool themselves, with the help of the psychologists of the media.
And their labor is harvested to the granaries of the rich. We call them banks, hedge funds, and stocks now.
So when someone tells you that redistribution of wealth is bad, you can tell them it's necessary, and so are population control and the United Nations.
How come we hardly ever talk the problems of politics through to the obvious conclusion that the solution is the effective abolition of soveriegn states and the implementation of the United Nations?