Posted by
L. on Sunday, December 13, 2009 12:00:00 AM
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Throughout history wherever people have roamed and settled, creating a means of order to successfully maintain a population, the issue of "wealth"* distribution has existed also.
First, I submit that what we call "wealth" starts out as a cooperative exchange. Consequently, those who are better at the dealing, eventually gain more "wealth"--whatever form it is--than those with whom they negotiate. I envision this type of trading--one-to-one, give-and-take--likened to a Spa, meaning a whirlpool bath. A Spa is open and circulates fairly randomly, with recurring pools and eddies. So similarly, business connections and networking do for people.
Now, eventually a leadership may become centralized as more and more power, via "wealth" acquisition, is concentrated in one area. Many factors give reasons for starting this process: war, famine, disease, economic failure, etc. What happens to the flow of "wealth"? It starts to flow in one direction. But a leadership can onlymaintain this power by returning some of that "wealth"--in other words, returning some of that "wealth" to the masses. This uni-direction now takes the form of a Fountain. The leadership draws much of the "wealth" together, which now flows upward in one direction then sprays it everywhere, wasting much of it without accountability or in meaningless gestures.
How does a leadership convince the masses to relinquish more of the "wealth" they have accumulated? The false assumption is that "wealth" is accumulated equally. It, as was explained in the Spa model, was not. The leadership needs someway of demonizing the adept "wealth" collectors and so convince the masses that these "rich" should relinquish what they have.
If we look through the pages of history, many divers vehicles have been used to accomplish this. Whatever convincing rationale, the end result of the Fountain model is the same. The Fountain reduces the amount of free--or random--interactions which generate this "wealth"--whatever it is. Unlike the Spa, which keeps most all of the trading capital circulating at high energy, the Fountain looks pretty, disturbes the flow of interaction by forcing the capital to move in a predetermined direction, and drops that capital back into the system without regard to the networks and interactions which generate it in the first place.
*"wealth" is in quotes, because I view it as a subjective concept.