19A007 Kill Off the 1%? by Jim Davies, 2/12/2019    

The ZGBlog about the 80/20 Rule showed that a natural law applies to pretty well everything: that 80% of results will derive from 20% of causes. From this, like it or not, about 1% of any population will control 50% of its resources. This is the "1%" about which envious socialists so vigorously foam at the mouth.

The same blog notes that if they got their way the composition of the 1% might change (eg those good at political manoevring may replace those good at business) but still and inevitably, 1% would control 50%.

So, just as seriously (or not) as Shakespeare proposed "first, let's kill all the lawyers" some would consider taking the richest 1%, and cutting their throats. What would follow?

First, the considerable assets the dear departed had owned would have to be distributed; around half of all the property in the country. That's no trivial task. The auctioneers would have a ball. Or perhaps the People's Collective in D.C. would allocate them equally among the whole population; hard to do with tangible assets (does one divide a Maserati laterally, or longitudinally?) though feasible, perhaps, in the case of liquid assets such as shareholdings in large companies.

Impractical though it seems to me, let's suppose it's done.

Next, observe that the population has now reduced to 99% of what it used to be, and that - as intended - property (and income?) is distributed more evenly. The idea that incomes (rewards for hard and effective work) become equal is bizarre; if a janitor earns the same as the CEO, what happens to ambition? Achievement? Excellence? But leave that aside for now; assets start off fairly equally owned.

Pareto's Law is a natural law. It may be delayed a little, but it is impossible to negate. Therefore, after a little while, 1% of the residual 99% will, for certain, come to control 50% of society's resources. The newly-enriched 1% will be less talented than the old set who were killed off (and so, since they are running things the whole society will be a bit worse off) but they will be in charge.

Then the whole vicious cycle could begin again; the killers with the switchblades might liquidate the new bunch of one-percenters; and they would need 1% fewer knives.

Imagine the cycle repeated, say 50 times. Result: the society will have reduced in size by 0.99 to the power of 50, which is 60.5% of the original. An America with 320 million will have shrunk to 194 million, with the most talented 126 million slaughtered.

That bloodbath would be comparable to the actual slaughters that governments wrought in the 20th Century, except that those were more or less non-discriminatory; except for the German Holocaust which targeted Jews and for the Soviet massacre of Polish intellectuals at Katyn, they just killed any who happened to get in the way of their demented purposes, whether rich or poor, idle or hardworking, brilliant or stupid. This deliberate elimination of the rich, cycled 50 times over, would remove the most talented 126 million, leaving comparative numbskulls in charge. The society would not only be smaller, it would be inestimably poorer.

Poorer, that is, if the executed 1% in each cycle had obtained their riches by offering goods and services that people wanted to buy, which will always be the case in the coming zero government society. If they were just smart apparachniks who had shouldered their way to the top of a political heap, their loss would bring no downside (not, mind, that I call for the offing of prominent Pols; there is a perfectly peaceful way to get rid of them.)

Envy of the successful has been built in to the value system of government school graduates so effectively that it's really hard to winkle them out of it, to convince them that a layer or class of very wealthy people is actually a benefit to us with more modest means. But perhaps this unusual edition of the ZGBlog will help a little.