Gates and co. are model citizens because they give away some surplus cash to charity? So the rich man is the saviour and hope of this world, and the richer he becomes the more he has to help others? I don’t think so.
The capitalist system is inherently unfair to the vast majority of the earth’s population because it concentrates the earth’s resources into a few hands, and you cannot change that equation. It is like a natural law. For there to be a few rich, the majority needs to be poor.
It all boils down to this: in a world of finite and limited natural resources, my gain is your loss - elementary maths. It is as simple as that. Without people starving, the rich nations cannot enjoy what they do, so if we enjoy our lifestyles, we should be highly grateful that grinding poverty and starvation exists.
We cannot just grow wealth. Well, we can in the monetary sense but it is meaningless. That can be done at the touch of a button. For example, the US govt creates billions of dollars out of thin air every week – last week alone $23 billion in commercial paper. Wealth is just an arbitrary value we place on natural resources, which we cannot grow any more of, and which are rapidly depleting. Defenders of capitalism might point to the fact that millions of people in places like China and India are lifted out of poverty every week through market economics. But it is all created from the mass depletion of the earth’s resources at a great cost, which is hugely intensifying the global rush that’s going on right now to secure dwindling energy. And this is creating rising underlying geopolitical tensions that will undoubtedly result in a world war within one or two decades. And with nuclear weaponry in ever wider hands, perhaps terrorist hands, the prospects do not look too good. There will be a mass cull of populations at some point.
And we cannot avert this scenario because no president or leader will ever stand up and say we must halt economic growth. That would be political suicide. Our leaders are mere pawns who promise what we, the voters want. It is us, you and me, who wants economic growth, who wants to grow richer and consume ever more resources. Therefore, it is us, you and me as individuals, that hold the real power to change the world in our individual choices of consumption. It is you and me that has the potential to become the real model citizens of this world, not by growing richer and being able to ‘help others’, but simply by living a lifestyle that can be sustainable for the entire planet of people. That is the only way to effectively express the compassion we all feel for those less fortunate. We need to curb our lifestyles and ambitions to leave a smaller footprint on this world.