In the first part of this article, we discussed how labour and consent form the first track of how human beings legitimately acquire wealth and material.

This track is easily understood by most people, and resonates with them in a way that suggests that this track is, more or less, natural to human beings.

But the modern world is largely run, at the higher levels, by the other major track, which is the rewarding of risk instead of labour. Once we embraced capitalism via mercantilism in the age of the tall ship, material prosperity caused capital to accumulate rapidly in the hands of a small group of people, and this enabled this group of people, like the early bankers, insurance men, and venture capitalists, to increase their wealth entirely by backing the ventures of other people. These other people did all the actual work, and in return for the risk the investors took, they got a percentage of the profits ad infinitum.

Thus, a group of people became still more wealthy simply by signing a document. They made money because they had money, and this allowed their wealthy to grow to staggering proportions.

This gave birth to the first stress between these two tracks of wealth acquisition, because wealth acquisition via investment simply lacks the intuitive resonance that the labour and consent track does. It is easy for the average person to understand being paid for work. The work is obvious. You work the production line, and you can see what you do while you are doing it. You tightened that screw, or worked that press, and thus you created wealth for your employers, and deserve compensation. It fits into the labour and consent model perfectly. I trade my work for your money. It is no different than hiring a kid to mow your lawn.

But investment lacks that clarity. From the point of view of the average worker, what, exactly, did the investors do? This is especially true when, as in most corporations, the investors (usually at least partly stockholders) retain a permanent interest in the business for their risk. Most people can grasp a casino model of reward for risk. You risk a certain amount and get a certain larger amount back if the risk pays out. But that’s it. You don’t get a percentage of the casino’s profits forever. You are paid and that is it.

In the business world, that is where loans come in. A bank risks money with every loan, but they loan you a fixed amount of money and then charge interest. If you business does well, you can pay back the loan, and that is the end of the bank’s interest in the business.

But investing for a permanent interest simply does not make sense to people on a gut level. And the longer the business prospers, the larger this gulf appears. Sure, someone took a risk by fronting the founder of the money the cash to start that first shop, but that was generations ago. Surely they have been paid back now? What have they done for the company lately?

Modern business practices, with boards of directors many layers away from the people who do the actual labour, in addition to shareholders to whom the stock is just a string of letters on a computer screen and who couldn’t care less what the company does because they only care about the stock price, only increases this alienation between the labour and the investor. Add in the confounding factor that in many large corporations, the company itself owns a lot of its own stock and hence its fortunes are driven by the fluctuations of the stock market, as opposed to old-fashioned concerns like whether they make a product that anybody buys. It becomes harder and harder for the average person to understand what, exactly, the stockholders are contributing to the equation. After all, the investment came when the company sold the stock the first time. The company doesn’t get any money when other people sell its stock. Yet everyone is, theoretically, working for the stockholders. Why?

This gulf between the investors and the workers has never been larger, and recent world economic events have brought this to light in a painfully obvious manner. The trend towards more and more money in fewer and fewer hands has reached the point where the billionaires are nations unto themselves, and view any attempt to stop them from doing anything ever to be outrageous violations of their sovereignty, and use their vastly superior personal power to fund whatever it takes to protect themselves from the rule of law.

The tension has grown to the point where there seems no way for the average person to bridge the gap.

What do you think?