The Poverty of Economics

or Work Will Set You Free

By Nikoli Weir

It seems to be an immutable law that wealth and power are one and the same.

Since the beginning of written history human society has been divided into classes. These class divisions will be different depending on the particular society you are looking at and its peculiar conditions. Some societies, like Ancient Rome, had class systems based on slavery and land ownership, with slaves and Plebeians at the bottom, and slave owners and land-owning Patricians at the top. In such societies, if you are a slave, or if you are a “free” Plebeian who owns no little to no land, you are a nobody, and as such have the rights of a nobody.

In some other societies, such as the various kingdoms and principalities of Medieval Europe, class is based on blood and family ties. If you are a member of a royal or aristocratic family, then you have power. Why? Because of something called “the divine right of kings.” In simple terms, they are powerful because they are blessed by God, and those without power must serve them, as that is their sacred duty. 

To us moderns, both of these social structures seem absurd, tyrannical and maybe even unnatural. This is a view that is not entirely unjustified. But what about the system we live under today? Should we not undertake to view our system through the same critical eye that we view previous systems?

We can easily understand that all the ideological systems of the past were nothing more than elaborate justifications for the already existing social structures and institutions. They were conceived of after the fact, in much the same way that a businessman will, after buying expensive goods, “write them off” as business expenses in order to avoid paying taxes on them. In the same way, the kings and priests of old, over a period of many centuries, developed doctrines to justify morally what they could not prove intellectually.

We recognize all of this but stop just short of the most important part; we fail to extend this critical analysis to our own social system. If we did, we would quickly realize that we never ceased “writing off” the expenses of our social system—capitalism—by means of moral subterfuge.

As an example, take the following talking point; “the rich have what they have because they worked harder than everyone else.” At first glance this seems to be nothing more than common sense. Those who work are rewarded, those who don’t aren’t. However, if this really was the case, you would expect to see rich people everywhere you look. 

The average American works a ridiculous amount; according to a 2021 Gallup Survey, 41% of Americans work more than 45 hours a week. If it were true that hard work was the key to wealth, you would expect all of these Americans to be drowning in it, and yet they aren’t. 

If it really were the case that hard work led to wealth, you would see millionaires who work as plumbers and school teachers. Yet you don’t see that. You see millionaires sitting on the boards of transnational corporations. You see millionaires who own hundreds of acres of land and dozens of houses that they rent out. You see millionaires whose only job is to manipulate the circulation of money so that they are able to make more of it. 

Last time I checked, none of these “jobs” actually produce anything; they just manage and exploit what has already been made by people who do actual work. And it is people with these “jobs,” people who don’t actually work, who tell you and me that if we want to get rich that we should just work hard, glossing over the fact that they got rich not from their own work, but from the work of others.

If the great lie of the ancient world was that the ruling classes descended from the gods and thus deserved to rule, and if the great lie of the Middle Ages was that the kings were anointed to rule by the one true God, then the great lie of capitalism is a masterpiece of simplification. Those monsters of modernity, the Nazis, knew it well, and engraved it above the gates to many of their concentration camps: “Arbeit macht frei;” work will set you free.