The health of a society is usually proportional to the distribution of wealth in the society. During the 19th century the wealth of the U.S. was heavily concentrated and there was more than enough strife. The Great Depression erased much of the accumulation of wealth and with the coming of WW II the equality of wealth in the U.S. became significantly more equal. Over the last 3 decades or so that equality has slid back heavily in favor of the few. Bill Gates having the wealth of the lowest 100 million U.S. citizens is completely unjustifiable no matter how he uses that money. The greed of our society and lopsided wealth is a great disease that will eat away at us until we die or collapse. Not only does the U.S. have the worst wealth distribution of any 1st world nation, we also have an extremely disproportionate amount of the world wealth.
The bottom half of Americans pay less than 4% of federal income taxes as a whole. However, due to the cutoffs of Social Security the proportion of SS and Medicare taxes favor the wealthy. In addition we have to pay property taxes, state taxes in 44? states, sales taxes, fuel taxes, sin taxes, excise taxes, and more taxes. By the time it is all counted up the wealthy don't pay sh*t compared to what they make. No one can ever justify to me why the top companies in the United States pay their CEOs 400-1000 times the average employee's wage when in many foreign countries such as Japan it is only around 15 times for their top companies. Even worse is when some CEO fails and gets tens or hundreds of millions when they get fired and it is far more frustrating when they get that and massive numbers of people get laid off.
I will say it again, capitalism is the worst large-scale economic system ever developed. It just promotes individualistic greed and destroys the desire to work for the common good. Just like a team playing as individuals, no nation of individuals can last.
From this link
Society definition
SOCIETY. A society is a number of persons united together by mutual consent, in order to deliberate, determine, and act jointly for some common purpose.
I guess our common purpose must be the raping of the planet, stealing of resources, murdering of innocents, polluting, desertification, deforestation, eroding, and crapping on human rights just so that we can consume and waste more in the name of the gods known as
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ME, MYSELF, and I
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