The rise of the superrich reveals that greed is winning and humanity losing

The one thing upon which the world’s major religions and most schools of philosophy are agreed are the perils and evil of human greed.

Unfortunately, there are some people who didn’t get this particular memo. Take the Waltons, for example, the family behind the Walmart retail empire. According to the financial and money website, Bloomberg, they get richer by $4 million every hour — yes, you read that right, not every week or month, every hour — while at the same time paying their workers (or as they prefer to refer to them, ‘associates’) a paltry eleven bucks an hour.

There is no human being on this Earth who can justify getting (not making, mind, getting) $4 million an hour, and there is no justification for paying any worker a wage as low as $11 an hour. Only the most psychologically dysfunctional or morally empty could conceivably consider such a scenario and wealth gap compatible with progress.

And yes, yes, yes we’ve heard it all before about human enterprise and dynamism and hard work and entrepreneurship. But these are merely words used to legitimize greed and avarice. Words thrown into the faces of the masses like so much dust to blind them as to the reality of the world and their true place in it. That place is as human drones, consigned to a life spent working their fingers to the bone for a pittance while being programmed to believe that they’re actually free.

If they are free it’s the freedom to be poor, to be homeless, to go hungry, and to suffer.

The Walton family, whose combined fortune currently sits at an outrageous $200 billion, aren’t the only reprobates at the apex of this world grown sick with greed. Hark the Mars family, the confectionery giants, with a fortune of $100 billion. That’s a lot of Mars Bars. Or how about the Kochs, notorious for bankrolling numerous politicians in Washington? They’re currently sitting on a mountain of assets to the tune of $125 billion. Finally, as for Elon Musk, currently the richest person in the world, he is the monster that unfettered greed produced, running his newly acquired Twitter business like a man in lust with the idea of turning his employees into serfs and himself into their lord and master.