Well, it’s finally happened. We just had our first honey harvest and, though both unexpected and small, it is a welcome harvest indeed. Why, you might ask, would a supposedly caring beekeeper be robbing his bees at this time of year when the desperate insects need all the honey they can get for raising their young and strengthening the hive in advance of the coming nectar flows? The answer, I’m afraid, is the same one we are likely to hear from Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the hooked-on-phonics president of the Eurogroup finance ministers, who might say: “We were just trying to save the Italians.”
As I’ve talked about before, one of our hives is populated by a lackluster band of warm-climate slackers who, to date, have not really gotten a handle on how to build a hive. When I went into the hive yesterday for its first major inspection of the year I found a hive box with comb running willy-nilly and ranging in thickness from zip to three inches. I pulled the offending frames of honey – one of which I left on the hive in its own box to serve as a food resource and the other I swept clean of bees and rushed into the winery/cidery/honey-house/upstairs-bathroom to take the honey.
What I found was that despite the Dubai-style architectural excess evidenced on this frame, there was a good solid wax structure from which, with some dexterous manipulation of a bread knife, I was able to preserve the comb, extract some honey from the cut away parts, and return to the bees both some good food and a sterling example of what their combs are supposed to look like.
I hope they get the hint because if they can’t get their act together in the next week, they’re getting taken over by the Germans.
Who, in their apiary incarnation as now two hives, are doing splendidly. Thousands of bees fill the air on the sunny spring days the Pacific Northwest is famous for. Trees blossom in profusion, flowers virtually burst from the ground, and the highly-tuned Carniolan bees – a German breed – stand poised to sweep it all up and make it theirs. It is enough just to witness the new Carni – as they are known in the biz – hive; a group I split off from the main hive a mere month ago. Already, despite four weeks without a queen and just getting going, they are stronger than their neighboring Italians and on their way to being another winner-take-all member of the ruling class.
It just isn’t fair.
Which brings us to the subject of today’s blog: The unfairness of it all.
I recently read the über-titled Plutocrats, The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland. I learned that a plutocrat was not, in fact, someone like Ming the Merciless an iron-fisted ruler of a tiny outer planet-ish, but, rather, someone with more money than they know what to do with and, even if they did, there wouldn’t be enough time before the sun winks out for them to do it in. It sounded like the line of work I was cut out for and I was hoping Chrystia’s tidy tome would be something along the lines of a “How-To” manual. Instead I found 291 pages of depressing information that reads like a litany of all the reasons why I will always be a loser; AKA part of “Everyone Else.” It’s enough to make you weep. Which I did.
The book, however, is nevertheless packed with surprises such as how few plutocrats there really are: a mere 1,226 billionaires globally, with only 84,700 people with assets above 100 million bucks. These people – not even enough to fill the empty seats at a baseball game – are not the top 10%. They are not even the publicly vilified 1%. This group of Ultra High Net-Worth Individuals – UHNWI as they are known to the people who prey upon them – are the .001%. They – all by themselves – have more money than the bottom 99.9% or, to put it another way, they and the rest of the top .1% control 81% of the global wealth pool.
The 1%? That’s what really rich people call “the help.”
But it’s all not fun and games in the stratosphere. The ultra-wealthy inhabit a different world than everyone else. No, it’s really a different world. Different concerns. Different circles. Different everything. Unless you’re talking about Warren Buffett who has proven to be the exception to the rule. The clamor at the top reaches such a din that there are psychiatric specialties just to deal with all the stress of being just so darn wealthy you can’t think straight. The competition is endless. Keeping up with the Joneses becomes a game not of how big your TV is or how new a Beemer you drive but how many helicopters fit on your yacht.
This different world syndrome has some real world ramifications for Everyone Else. The super-rich are easily able to influence proceedings for the rest of us. Because they control most of the money, they have a disproportionate share of political clout; witness the multi-trillion dollar bailout – that you paid for – in the financial sector a few years back. They have a disproportionate economic influence – which you may have paid for by watching your job go elsewhere in the world. And they have a disproportionate influence on what youconsider to be possible, to the point that we actually approve of this historically unprecedented accumulation of wealth just in case we ever get rich ourselves.
It’s no wonder that in the US the 99% has got it in for the 1%, even though most of them – the 1% that is – are being left in the financial dust by the top 0.01% whose average annual income is over $23-million or 100 times that of the 1%.
Those bastards! Let’s take it all!
Not so fast. Because, in a nutshell, it would be a waste of time.
If you were to impose a 100% tax on these suffering 15,000 people who are so rich that they need to see a shrink to deal with the existential issues which lugging around that many zeros causes, you still wouldn’t end up with much: $345 billion the first year (a 10% drop in the recently proposed US federal budget-bucket) but nothing in out years because they would have all moved to Davos.
No, not just their income, everything!
Still not enough. Even if you cleaned out all of the 1% completely, you could only run the federal government for about five years. Again, it might be satisfying initially, but the real pain will come down the road. Sort of like eating bouillabaisse with a bad clam in it.
So what are we, the 99.99% of “Everyone Else”, to do? It’s simple: become a billionaire, and Plutocrats even gives a few hints at the common denominators that most of the fabulously successful in the US share. First, you want to have reasonably “common” beginnings: go to public school, grow up in or near a big city (there are no insanely wealthy farmers), that sort of thing. Second, your parents should have enough resources to get you into 1) Harvard or 2) Stanford where you get a degree in math or science. Then you get a job with Goldman Sachs or start Microsoft, Google, or Facebook. Alternatively, you could go to Princeton and start Amazon. But since all those companies have been taken you could just start a different company and sell it to one of them for a billion, like Zappos did. See how easy it is? All it takes is a little luck.
Oh, yeah, and while you’re at it, consider how lucky you are not to be doing it in China. Despite their boom-boom economy and with – to date – ninety-five billionaires, there is a slight problem: it’s still a state-run economy. If the ruling politburo decides you might be making waves or thinking democratic thoughts, it’s already too late. Since 2003 fourteen Chinese billionaires have been executed.
Talk about a head tax.
So now I’ve got to run out and play with the bees. The weeds are overrunning the garden and the chickens are clamoring to go free-ranging. There’s just so much to do on the micro-farm I don’t know when I’ll find the time to become a plutocrat. As always, hope springs eternal, and maybe I can find a way to do it that doesn’t take so much money.