---- The rich 1% deserve their wealth

 

Editorialist Fred Ryan writes that the only beneficiaries of social chaos are the 1-to-2% of the population that controls over 50% of the world's wealth. He goes on to say that we will continue to be “divided amongst ourselves, as long as we remain focussed on blaming some minority” for the problems that beset us. The inconsistency? 1-to-2% is a minority.

Yes, there are some in society who are far wealthier than the rest of us.  So what? What matters is how they became that wealthy. Most created products or services we needed and offered them at a price we could afford. We made them rich because their genius, ingenuity, vision, and determination made it possible for us to enjoy a way of life that our grandparents never had. 

Entrepreneurs have made life easier for all of us and deserve their wealth. We must not allow the lavish life-styles of some to blind us to their true worth. Envy and pettiness ill become us; we're bigger than that. Further, most of the money entrepreneurs make is reinvested in ways that create jobs, new products and services. 

I shudder at the thought that innovators and risk-takers be dissuaded from continuing to do for society what, all things considered, has been beneficial. ...  (Yet) all some of us can think of  is blaming them for problems of our own creation. 

Social unrest exists not because our form of governance is structurally skewed to favour the very rich and it won't be eased by more laws and regulations. The problem is ethical and the solution is to be found in the heart of every one of us. We have to re-connect with what we learned at our mothers' knees about respect for others and lost somewhere along the road to becoming “woke”.

Ronald Lefebvre

Aylmer