In the beginning, the commons was everywhere. Humans
and other animals roamed around it, hunting and
gathering. Like other species, we had territories, but
these were tribal, not individual. ...
Why did this happen? There are many
explanations. One is that welfare kept the poor poor;
this was argued by Charles Murray in his 1984 book
Losing Ground. Welfare, he contended, encouraged
single mothers to remain unmarried, increased the
incidence of out-of-wedlock births, and created a
parasitic underclass. In other words, Murray (and others)
blamed victims or particular policies for perpetuating
poverty, but paid scant attention to why poverty exists
in the first place.
There are, of course, many roots, but my own
hypothesis is this: much of what we label private wealth
is taken from, or coproduced with, the commons. However,
these takings from the commons are far from equal.
To put it bluntly, the rich are rich because
(through corporations) they get the lion’s share of
common wealth; the poor are poor because they get very
little.
Another way to say this is that, just as water
flows downhill to the sea, so money flows uphill to
property. Capitalism by its very design
maximizes returns to existing wealth owners. It benefits,
in particular, those who own stock when a successful
company is young; they can receive hundreds, even
thousands of times their initial investments when the
company matures. Moreover, once such stockholders
accumulate wealth, they can increase it through
reinvestment, pass it on to their heirs, and use their
inevitable influence over politicians to gain extra
advantages — witness the steady lowering of taxes
on capital gains, dividends, and inheritances. On top of
this, in the last few decades, has been the phenomenon
called globalization. The whole point of globalization is
to increase the return to capital by enabling its owners
to find the lowest costs on the planet. Hence the
stagnation at the bottom alongside the surging wealth at
the top. ...
read the whole chapter