Amiirii Rekha: Ceiling On Wealth
Ravindra
Singh
It is against this
backdrop Proutist Bloc, India demands ‘Amiirii Rekha’ i.e. a ceiling on the
accumulation of physical wealth by an individual, as suggested by the first
fundamental principle of PROUT: No individual should be allowed to
accumulate any physical wealth without the clear permission or approval of the
collective body.
While the imposition of
a ceiling on the accumulation of wealth may seem dictatorial to many, it can be
justified on the following basis:
a) The right to property
is not natural: Unlike the right
to live, think and speak, the right to property is not a natural right. Nobody
is born or dies with any physical wealth. Everything – air, water, land, light,
sun, moon and, even our body and mind –is a gift from nature; we have done
nothing to earn them. Nobody, therefore, can claim the ownership of anything;
we have only the usufructuary rights i.e. the right to use.
Except a few western and
European countries, the native cultures of Asia, Africa, America and Australia
consider god the master and owner of the universe. The right to property came
into existence around the end of the 18th century when England
and some other European countries witnessed the historical Industrial
Revolution. Scrambling for more and more profits, the capitalists exploited
everything aggressively – land, water, forests, minerals, flora and fauna, and
even their fellow human beings. Their dominance in the social and
political life of the times made the right to property so sacred.
b) Physical wealth is
limited: The earth has plenty yet
limited resources. Ideally they should be used for more than 7 billion human
beings and countless other beings. But if they are concentrated in the hands of
a few people, the rest of humanity will have to live a hellish life. A little
data below shows that this has already happened:
One the one hand
- Only 1% of the world’s population owns more wealth than the rest of the population.1
- The richest 8 people own more than the collective wealth of 3.5 billion people i.e. half of the world’s population.2
- Even in US, 400 richest people have more wealth than the bottom 61 percent of the US population. 3
On the other hand
- While 10% Indians possess 80% wealth of India, 1/3 of the world’s poor live in India.4
- 57 Indian Billionaires Own Wealth Equal to Bottom 70% of Country’s Population.5
- 75 percent of rural India survives on Rs 33 per day.6
- According to WHO, every year 98,000 people in India die from diarrhea as they have no access to clean drinking water.7
- About 3000 children die from hunger and malnutrition in India every day.8
This leads to a clear
conclusion that the present socio-economic system ,which allows for
unrestricted accumulation of wealth, is utterly unwarranted, and therefore
Amiirii Rekha is completely justified. Amiirii Rekha will have the following
effects:
Removal of
Poverty: when there is a limit to
which a person can accumulate, the excess will flow to others, leading
naturally to the removal of poverty. Besides, PBI proposes the following
measures for the removal of poverty and healthy growth:
- The minimum and maximum income of a person must be fixed.
- The minimum income must be high enough to purchase basic requirements i.e. food, clothes, shelter, education and medical care.
- More talented, hardworking and honest people should be given more salary and incentives to a certain limit. The maximum must not be more than 10 times the minimum.
- The gap between the two must be gradually reduced, but not completely done away with. Complete equality, like extreme inequality, is unnatural and discourages the meritorious and the hard working, causing the fall in the quality and quantity of production. The communist economies like Russia are the best example of this impractical approach.
Removal of
Corruption: Man needs money to
fulfill his present needs and the future or emergency needs. If he continues to
accumulate money even after earning enough for both the needs, it means he has
fallen prey to a mental disease, in which he is drawing pleasure out of sheer
accumulation.. Accumulating money has become a number game for him – from 1
million to 10 millions to 100 millions and so on – the diseases continues.
If I told you that a
friend of mine is fond of caps. He has a good collection of caps; he has caps
piled up everywhere in the drawing room, on the sofa, on the table; in the
bedroom -- on the bed, in the bed, under the bed; in the bathroom, in the
toilet, in the kitchen, on the roof, in the courtyard, in the backyard and now
he is planning to buy one more flat to store more of his caps, you wouldn’t
hesitate much in declaring him mad. In sharp contrast to this, the people who
are equally and madly engaged in accumulating money are respected and seen as
role models in our society. But what is the difference between collecting caps
and hoarding the wealth that you won’t use? Just think -- if hoarding grains,
fruit, vegetables, oil etc. beyond a certain limit is unethical and illegal,
why should hoarding of the ‘means’ to acquire these commodities be just
and legal?
Money can fulfill your
‘need’, not your ‘greed’. The corruption is caused by the people who are
suffering from the mental ailment called avarice or geed. The people –-
government officials, politicians or businessmen –- who need money to maintain
their social status and luxurious lifestyle commit scams; it is they who give
or take bribes. The corruption caused by common person under some compulsion
can be easily done away with, but the corruption bred by towering greed can be
checked only when there is a ceiling on wealth.
A question can arise
here: how can the income or expenditure of a person be watch and controlled? It
is, of course, a difficult task, but in this age of sophisticated technology,
it is not impossible. Can’t it be regulated like our phone’s talk time and
internet data?
Cure for Economic
Depression: The world is passing
through a severe economic depression. The shopkeepers are worried about falling
numbers of footfalls. Markets are crammed with goods and services but there are
no buyers. For example, newly constructed houses are not selling although
millions of people are forced to sleep under the open sky. In a country like
America the number of vacant homes (18.6 million) is more than the homeless
people(3.5 million).9
The depression occurs
when a large portion of available money is concentrated in a few hands and the
greater part of the population is partially or fully deprived of ‘purchasing
power’. In this situation when the goods produced in the factories don’t get
sold, the capitalists cut down the production and lay off or retrench their
employees declining the purchasing power of the people further.
The solution is ‘keep
the money rolling’; let it not lie unused in a few pockets. Like a pool of
stagnant water, stagnant money too gives rise to the diseases like economic
depression, unemployment, poverty, crime etc. To make our economy function
smoothly, we must ensure that money reaches each and every member of society so
that they have sufficient purchasing power to buy the goods and
services needed for a good life. And the first step in this direction is
Amiirii Rekha.
Solution to
Unemployment: About
a million (ten lakhs) Indians reach the employment age every month.10 It means India needs about 120 millions jobs every
year. According to labour bureau
statistics, job creation or job growth for 2015 and 2016 stood at 1.55 lakh and
2.31 lakh in numbers respectively. The situation in the previous years hadn’t
been less dismal.11
Do we
have these jobs ? The answer is ‘no’. Can these jobs be generated? The answer
is ‘yes’. With so many industries , schools, colleges, hospitals, roads,
railway tracks, bridges, canals etc. waiting to be built all over the country
and a large army of skilled and unskilled people desperately willing to be
employed, it is possible to tackle the problem of unemployment. But the
government does not have sufficient money to invest in these projects and
thereby create employment. So, through FDI and PPP, it invites investment from
big capitalists, who have zillions at their disposal. They do invest but with
an intention to earn more and more out of less and less. And since employment generation
is not their goal, they withdraw the moment they sense any danger to their
profits or investment leaving everybody else in the lurch.
Moreover, the people with money
want to make more money quickly and easily, so they tend to invest
in speculation instead of productive activities. John Eatwell, one of the leading specialists in
finance at Cambridge University, estimates that, in 1970, about 90% of
international capital was used for trade and long-term investment-more or less
productive things- and 10% for speculation. By 1990, those figures had
reversed: 90% for speculation and 10% for trade and long-term investment.12
The solution is Amiirii Rekha. Let nobody
accumulate so much wealth that they hijack the entire economy. Let nobody
posssess such vast sums of money that the entire development process is subject
to their whims and desires. Once this is done, there will be socialization of
wealth and there will enough money for production and development leading to
more and more employment opportunities.
Decline in crime
rate: Besides the
psychological causes, the lack or the excess of money is a chief cause of crime
in our society. While the people without sufficient money for their basic
necessities get into crime under compulsion, the people who possess excess of
wealth get entangled in crimes as they have all the time and resources to allow
their baser instincts to go wild.
Today, if you are good
at studies and lucky enough to grab one of the few available jobs; or if you
have lots of money for starting a business and have the ability to
survive with big sharks of the business world, you can hope to make a living
for yourself. But the question arises: what is the option for those who can’t
do so? Don’t they need food, clothes, shelter, education and medication? Isn’t
it natural for them to adopt unlawful means to earn a living ? So it would not
be wrong to say that a limit on the accumulation of wealth i.e. Amiirii Rekha
and a guarantee of the fulfillment of basic necessities will put an end to the
economic disparity responsible for increasing crime.
It is simplistic to say
that Amiirii Rekha alone will solve every problem we are facing today. In fact,
we will have to bring about many other radical changes in our socio-economic
setup, but Amiirii Rekha i.e. the principle of social control over limited physical
wealth will set the ball rolling.
Sources:
1. http://www.euronews.com/2016/01/18/the-richest-1-percent-own-more-than-99-percent-of-world-s-population
2. https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world
3. https://www.thenation.com/article/20-people-now-own-as-much-wealth-as-half-of-all-americans/
4. https://scroll.in/article/826484/embargoed-jan-16-00-01gmt-57-billionaires-possess-70-of-indias-wealth-oxfam-inequality-report
5. https://thewire.in/100250/57-indian-billionaires-own-wealth-equal-to-bottom-70-of-countrys-population/
6. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/india-rural-household-650-millions-live-on-rs-33-per-day/1/451076.html
7. http://www.ijetsr.com/images/short_pdf/1501571529_905-911-ietech950_ijetsr.pdf
9. https://trofire.com/2015/07/21/3-5-million-americans-are-homeless-18-6-million-homes-in-america-are-standing-empty-what-is-wrong-with-this-picture/
10. http://www.firstpost.com/business/a-million-indians-reach-employable-age-each-month-more-jobs-better-jobs-data-needed-2741546.html
11. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/narendra-modi-job-creation-unemployment/1/956889.html
12. https://chomsky.info/secrets01/
