Covid Island Discs

Song 1: If everyone was listening, Supertramp

The first time I ever linked this song to politics was when Ronald Reagan first came to power in the 1980s. The song for me captured the moment with its lines:

Well how do you plead
An actor indeed
Go re-learn your lines
You don’t know what you’ve done
The finale’s begun.

Reagan of course was an actor and when he came to power it felt that the cold war could erupt into a full nuclear conflict. Thankfully, this scenario was avoided and yet little did anyone know that Reagan was to set in motion 50 years of rapidly growing and unsustainable wealth inequality that would result in a US billionaire class and the top 0.1% controlling 13.5% of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 50% controlled only a further 2.5% in 2024.

So I write this post as Trump gets inaugurated for the second time in 8 years. It is incredible to me that someone as immoral and sociopathic as Trump could become President even once, let alone twice. And yet many historians see obvious parallels with past nation empires especially with the rise of the Caesars in the Roman empire.

The pattern seems to always be the same. Too much wealth inequality where many people become desperate for a slice of the pie even though that pie is plentiful. The problem is a small oligarchy that hoards resource forcing many of their fellow citizens into poverty.

The big mistake the USA and subsequently many Western nations made was to conflate the regulation of wealth distribution with egalitarianism or even socialism. The idea that there should be a good differential between the net worth of someone who has contributed much to society versus someone who has contributed little, makes complete sense. However, in such a world the poorest may only possess a small amount of capital whilst the richest might possess many millions. Let’s say 50 million. Yet we do not live in a world like that. Instead we live in a world where there are now a substantial number who have 950 million more than the 50-millionaire. These individuals are hiding behind the traditional wealthy hoping that those who struggle to make ends meet do not differentiate between someone who has a personal fortune of 50 million versus someone who hoards a billion.

The odd thing about Americans voting Trump into power is they think someone who is a billionaire is going to fix the system that creates billionaires. Obviously, such an idea is preposterous. So is there any hope? Well according to the historians, the current state of affairs is unstable. Wealth inequality like this will not last forever and it will be corrected in one of four ways:

1. A major conflict either a civil or international war.
2. A revolution.
3. A major catastrophe such as a pandemic or major natural disaster
4. Major political reform driven by strong leaders who forcibly pursue wealth redistribution to help correct the inequality

The 4^th option has happened in the USA before at the turn of the 20^th century in what was called the gilded age. Presidents like Roosevelt and Wilson introduced many reforms to control the burgeoning wealth of the aptly named robber barons. Let’s hope the current problems plaguing the USA are corrected peacefully as they were at the turn of the 20^th century rather than by a revolution or civil war which would be catastrophic in a nation that is so awash with guns.