What have the rich done for us lately?

WITH THE Occupy Wall Street movement growing by leaps and bounds, the bankers and CEOs finally have to say something in response to the people's demands. And so far, all the things they've said have one feature in common: They ask us to take it for granted that Wall Street investors--and the rich in general--deserve to be rich. They do not argue this point. They simply assert it. If a man is rich, we are expected to believe that he must have done something to earn it.

But why should we? Has Wall Street done anything to benefit the rest of us? Are the rich doing anything useful? If not, if they do not contribute anything to society, then perhaps they don't deserve to be rich after all. In that case, maybe we should create a new economic system without Wall Street, corporations, shareholders or CEOs.

Let me clarify what I mean by "the rich." I do not mean people with above-average income. I mean the top 5 percent, the people who get more money in a year than most of us could dream of in a lifetime: the Wall Street bankers, CEOs of large companies, big shareholders, real estate barons. People like Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, the Koch brothers and the leaders of Goldman Sachs. Any one of them holds more wealth than thousands of ordinary Americans put together.

Where does all their money come from? Not from working harder than the average person. No one is thousands of times more productive than average. Rupert Murdoch does not do the job of a thousand Fox News employees, and the Koch brothers don't stand around making millions of toilet paper rolls every day. The rich do not actually produce any goods or services themselves. We do it for them.

But we are often told that the rich somehow work with their minds; that they are great innovators. This is usually a lie. The majority of the rich do not innovate. They hire people to innovate for them – just like they hire people to make things for them.

Think of the building of homes, for example, which is one of the largest industries in the U.S. Who builds houses? Construction workers. Who designs the houses and invents new ways to build them? Architects, who are also workers. And what do the owners and CEOs of real estate conglomerates contribute to all this? Absolutely nothing.

Just look around you. Chances are that all the objects you can see right now were built by low-income workers employed in factories and designed or invented by middle-income workers employed in corporate research and development departments. Their rich bosses had almost nothing to do with it--they just profited from other people's work.

That is not to say that the rich don't come up with any new ideas. They do. But Donald Trump doesn't design better houses, airline company owners don't invent new planes and pharmaceutical company CEOs don't cure diseases. They come up with ideas about how to make money. The rich came up with sub-prime mortgages, credit default swaps and other "financial innovations" that caused this great recession. They also came up with creative new ways to crush unions, drive down wages, cut your health insurance and refuse to pay for your medical treatment because you have a pre-existing condition.

MANY RICH people do indeed have very gifted minds. But they use them to make life worse for the rest of us. And then they have the nerve to say that they deserve their obscene wealth because of their great innovations. We should be making them pay fines for their harm to society, not rewarding them.

Think of any virtue that you would like to see rewarded: hard work, intelligence, creativity, generosity, kindness. Capitalism does not reward any of these. In some cases it even punishes people who practice them. Capitalism punishes hard work, because the people who work the hardest, most grueling, most unpleasant jobs--mining coal, digging tunnels, cleaning toilets--are usually among the lowest paid.

Capitalism does not reward intelligence because the most intelligent people with the most years of education--like scientists and doctors--are not the ones who become super-rich.

Capitalism does not reward creativity because creative people--artists, musicians, inventors--can end up anywhere from dirt poor to very rich.

And capitalism certainly does not reward generosity, kindness or any other human values. In fact, you get punished for caring about others. A boss who is generous to his workers will get driven out of business by Wal-Mart, and people who dedicate their lives to others (e.g. social workers) get paid very little. The fact that many people are still generous anyway is an amazing testament to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of the evils of capitalism. I can only imagine how many more people would act that way if we lived in a society that didn't give us incentives to be selfish and greedy.

What capitalism rewards is greed and ruthlessness. If you have these two things, then--and only then--will you succeed. The greed of the bankers on Wall Street is not an accident. We live in an economic system that encourages us all to be like them, by creating vast inequalities of wealth and putting the worst people on top. That needs to change.

So when the defenders of capitalism ask us why we demand equality or why we occupy Wall Street, this should be our first answer: Because the rich do not deserve to be rich.
Mike Tudoreanu, Amherst, Mass.

First published in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian.