Unearned Income: Is A Crime

Jesus was probably murdered after turning over the money lenders tables. Society was already on its way to ruin 2022 years ago. Ninety-plus percent of us should be furious that unearned income and endless wealth is built into society.

How Can People Get Rich Without Doing Anything?

True short stories:

Woman owns rental six homes out East, lives like a queen from rent families work one or two jobs to pay.
Young fellow plays little league ball, he will eventually inherit part of the largest privately held company in the world.
$12,000 deposit just came in for annual interest income. $28,000 quarterly check is a day late, they’re so PO’ed.
Friend bought AOL stock, it just kept kept going up.
Bought Bitcoin at $600, sold it at $12,000. OMG, someone bought Bitcoin at $65,000, now it’s worth $37,000, WTF?

What Is Unearned Income

Unearned income is a term coined by Henry George to refer to income gained through ownership of land and other monopoly. Today the term often refers to income received by virtue of owning property (known as property income), inheritance, pensions and payments received from public welfare. The three major forms of unearned income based on property ownership are rent, received from the ownership of natural resources; interest, received by virtue of owning financial assets; and profit, received from the ownership of capital equipment. As such, unearned income is often categorized as “passive income”—Wikipedia.[0]

Reading between the lines, unearned income means one gets more money if they already have money. How much sense does that make? A lot, if one is rich! What if one is part of the 90 plus percent that are not wealthy enough to own a large home outright, or have a spare half million after taxes to invest. If all people are created equal, is that fair? What does making the rich richer for free mean for society?

Amazon, Jeff Bezos, Minimum Wage, The Stock Market, and Wealth

With a net worth of $176 billion,[1] Jeff Bezos is the wealthiest man in the world. But, because of the way money and capitalism organizes civilization, he gets all of that stock market wealth. and his 1.3 million employees[2], who do the work, get almost zilch. As of November 1, 2018, 250,000 Amazon employees still get only $15 and hour[3], or less than a living wage. Benefiting greatly from the Covid pandemic, Amazon profits $33 billion a year, yes billion.[4] Do the employees see that? No. Do the employees get part of the $176 billion in Jeff Bezos’s wealth? No. The wealthiest man in the world could give half of his stock away to his employees, and still be worth $88 billion. That would be $680,000 per employee as a thank you for their hard work. Does he? No. Who whips all the boxes? The Employees. Who got the stock capital gains? The stock holders.

Most billionaires can credit their unearned wealth to the stock market. Some of these guys are real scum bags in my personal opinion. Jeff Bezos works people hard for $15 lousy bucks. Bill Gates stole his windows from Apple, and did not even write DOS, but bought it for $50,000 from Seattle Computer Systems on July 27, 1981[5]. Mark Zuckerberg harvests your private data and sells it. Same with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Warren Buffet is a bottom feeder profiting from buying and selling companies. To top it off, Google basically stole Oracle’s Java without paying a license for it to write the Android operating system because they were not as smart as Apple, and could not write their own mobile operating system.[6] This is all just my personal view, but do I have 40 years of tech and financial investing experience.

Obscene Wealth Makes Lords

Here is the problem, at some point, probably $50 million, so much wealth becomes unstoppable. Our economic system ensures that the wealthy stay wealthy. Think, The Queen of England, wealthy for generations. The best way to make money is to inherit it, talk about unearned income. Unearned and endless wealth maintains an upper class of sometimes selfish, insecure, entitled, know-better, rude, and generally lousy people. Money is a disease. It either disenfranchises those who do not have it, or twists those who do. The wealthy can manipulate politics and prevent reforms. A system the ensures the wealthy keep and expand their wealth is corrupt to the core. The stock market, interest, real estate gains are literally criminal thefts from the rest of society to keep the wealthy – wealthy.

We need a new social organizational system that is equitable, and also stops growing human population at the expense of all other species. Imagine what good could be done with all of this ill-gotten wealth.

[0] Wikipedia.com. Unearned Income.

[1] Wikipedia.com. Jeff Bezos. February 23, 2022.

[2] Geekwire.com. Amazon now employs nearly 1.3 million people worldwide after adding 500,000 workers in 2020. Taylor Soper. February 2, 2021.

[3] Wired.com. Why Amazon Really Raised Its Minimum Wage to $15. Louise Matsakis. October 18, 2018.

[4] Statista.com. Annual net income of Amazon.com from 2004 to 2021.

[5] Windowscentral.com. Microsoft bought MS-DOS on July 27, 1981.

[6] CNBC.com. Supreme Court rules in Google’s favor in copyright dispute with Oracle over Android software. Tucker Higgins. April 6, 2021.

[Image 2] Amazon.com. Amazon Raises Minimum Wage to $15 for All U.S. Employees.

[Image 3] English.Alarabya.net. Biggest billionaires: The top 10 richest people in the world.

Chuck Burr is author of Culturequake: The Restoration Revolution. Revised 10th Anniversary, Fourth Edition. Please share.