Private Wealth and Common Wealth
The concept of compound empowerment stresses the degree to which the acquisition of great private wealth depends upon common structures. For example, while a wealthy individual such as Bill Gates might owe his status as the world's richest man largely to his intelligence and innovation, his ability to earn and maintain his fortune was and is compounded by public resources held in common. According to theorists such as George Lakoff, the prominent cognitive linguist and founder of the non-partisan think tank the Rockridge Institute, Bill Gates "built his company with many employees educated in public schools and universities. Tax-funded research helped develop computer science and the Internet. Trade laws negotiated and enforced by the government protect his ability to sell his products abroad. These are but a few of the ways in which Mr. Gates' accumulation of wealth was empowered by the common wealth and by taxation."
The inextricability of private wealth and public resources was influentially formulated by the political philosopher John Rawls, who argued that wealth is arbitrary from a moral point of view, as those factors that enable the accumulation of wealth in a society are largely contingent--that is, are the outcome of luck more than of morally relevant activity.
Read more about this topic: Compound Empowerment
Famous quotes containing the words private, wealth and/or common:
“Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.”
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“What cannot stand must fall; and the measure of our sincerity and therefore of the respect of men, is the amount of health and wealth we will hazard in the defence of our right. An old farmer, my neighbor across the fence, when I ask him if he is not going to town-meeting, says: “No, ‘t is no use balloting, for it will not stay; but what you do with the gun will stay so.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I have more in common with a Mexican man than with a white woman.... This opinion ... chagrins women who sincerely believe our female physiology unequivocally binds all women throughout the world, despite the compounded social prejudices that daily affect us all in different ways. Although women everywhere experience life differently from men everywhere, white women are members of a race that has proclaimed itself globally superior for hundreds of years.”
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