COMMONWEALTH
IS A GOOD WORD
Commonwealth
is a word
that has been in use in the English language since the late fifteenth
century. And it has been a good
word: good being
itself a social word, from the same root as gather
and
together. Massachusetts
and Kentucky are commonwealths, not
just states. As commonwealths, they
are dedicated to the common good. The
motto of the Commonwealth of Kentucky is “United We Stand, Divided
We Fall.”
We
have perverted the idea of wealth,
however.
Wealth
these days is what every American is supposed to pursue for himself
or herself--and to hell (or poverty) with everybody else. And thus
we get Donald Trump.
Of
course, Trump is a minor leaguer. His bragging about having
$9,000,000,000 is silly, in the grand scale of American greed.
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are each worth ten times that. They
sit on fortunes of $90,000,000,000 each.
There
are currently 45,000,000 Americans living in poverty. That's
15,000,000 households or families. Suppose Buffett and Gates gave
each of those 15,000,000 families a thousand dollars. That would
cost them $15,000,000,000 each--and they would still have
$75,000,000,000 each, which would earn as much as the $15,000,000,000
that each of them gave away.
But
neither Buffett nor Gates is going to live forever, so they can
afford to give a lot more than 16.5% of their hoardings. Let's have
them give away 90% of their hoardings--and they will each still have
more than the bragging peanut-vendor Donald Trump.
Or
let's give them three years. The first year Buffett and Gates can
each give $3,000 per household to the Americans living in poverty.
That will cost them $45,000,000,000 each--half their wealth. And
those poor families will have an extra $6,000 each.
The
second year, Buffett and Gates will have $45,000,000,000 each plus
the $5,000,000,000 that their fortunes have earned for them--without
their doing any work at all! So they can each give $2,000 per
household to those living in poverty. That will cost each of them
$30,000,000,000--and leave each of them with $20,000,000,000.
The
third year they can each give $1,000 per household to those living in
poverty. That will cost them $15,000,000,000 each--and still leave
each of them with more money than Donald Trump has!
Of
course, even this kind of giving won't eradicate American poverty.
But if we use it as a model--for all American billionaires, and maybe
even for millionaires, in threee years' time we could make the United
States a commonwealth,
and even a functioning society.
And if we could do
that, then maybe we could all turn in our guns!
