CNBC Contributor: "You have more people that vote for a living than work for a living....I think you're lucky if you don't lose your life."
by David Atkins
Marc Faber, permabear and commentator on economic royalist channel CNBC, made waves yesterday with a hysterical yet fascinating bit of "analysis":
Growing wealth inequality means that the wealthy have nowhere to hide and that events like those in Cyprus will happen in more countries around the world, including developed nations, said Marc Faber, the contrarian investor and publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report.
"It will happen everywhere in the world, in Western democracies," Faber said "Squawk on the Street" on Tuesday. "You have more people that vote for a living than work for a living. I think you have to be prepared to lose 20 to 30 percent. I think you're lucky if you don't lose your life."
"If you look at what happened in Cyprus, basically people with money will lose part of their wealth, either through expropriation or higher taxation," he added.
"The problem is that 92 percent of financial wealth is owned by 5 percent of the population. The majority of people don't own meaningful stock positions and they don't benefit from a rise in the stock market. They are being hurt by a rising cost of living and we all know that the real incomes of median households has been going down for the last few years," he said.
It takes some real gall to acknowledge that 92% of all financial wealth is controlled by 5% of the population, that median household incomes have been shrinking, and to even still say the problem is that the moochers and looters are voting themselves benefits instead of working for them. It's bizarre to the point that I can't even get inside this person's head.
Combined with the newly discovered fact that the plutocratic class has at least $32 trillion--that's trillion, with a "t"--stashed away in offshore accounts, it takes some very strange belief systems to assume that the market distributes rewards exactly in proportion to just deserts, that only a very few people therefore are productive at all, while the rest of humanity is a lounging mass of excrement voting themselves into a life just evading the squalor their laziness merits. It's inconceivable and childlike narcissism.
I think on some level most of these people know they don't deserve the ungodly wealth they've been lucky to accumulate at everyone else's expense. At some level they have to know that the difference between their success and others' failures had as much to do with luck, connections and often family ties as any particular effort or brilliance on their part. I think they must also know deep down that concentrating their lives on accumulation of wealth while most of the rest of the world devotes itself to survival, family, following divine dictates and bettering the lives of others, makes them worse human beings in spite of their extravagant riches.
They must know deep down that all of this is terribly wrong. They know the hand of karma either waits round the corner, or ought to. That insecurity and fear leads to a lot of self-justification, immoral universe construction and paranoia. It's no way to live. It also helps explain why so many of our elites make such bad decisions.
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