This question <702|702> overall <701|703> Chris: <536|20>.

Question 777: “The poor and idle are a necessary consequence of the rich and active.” Right or wrong?

[702] Chris: Who is idle?   The first thought when reading this question is that it is correct, that the “poor and idle” are a necessary consequence for the rich and active. It is from the poor working man that the rich accumulate all their wealth.

Hans: That would mean the poor are a necessary condition, not a necessary consequence of the rich. It is a consequence only for your thinking about it: if you see a rich and idle elite then you can conclude from this that there must be others who work without getting the benefit of their labor.

[702] Chris: But this wealth is not accumulated from the “idleness” of the poor, a capitalist does not accumulate surplus-value from people who do not work or are idle. The rich receive their wealth upon the backs of the working class who do not have access to the means of production. Capitalism is based upon the exploitation of the laborer but if the laborer is not working then there is nothing to exploit, you can't accumulate wealth off of idleness. It can also be argued that the last part of the question, “rich and active”, is not necessarily true. Capitalists do not have to be active to accumulate their riches, as long as they own the means of production they don't even have to work. The large inequalities of wealth that we see in the world today are caused by the fact that the poor are industrious, we all have to work, and through this work we make a select few people extremely wealthy and then we can read about their wealth in Forbes. So I believe that this sentence is wrong in the fact that capitalists become rich when the poor are active and it is detrimental to them when the poor are idle.

Hans: If one puts everything you say together then the aphorism should read: the rich and idle are a necessary consequence of the poor and active. Right?

Chris: In a capitalist society that would read right. The rich are not always idle but in comparison to the wealth they amass they can be considered idle.

Hans: Good point.

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