2. “The Rich Always Feed on the Poor”
Come on baby, eat the rich
Put the bite on the son of a bitch
Don’t mess up, don’t you give me no switch
Come on baby, and eat the rich
Come on baby, and eat the rich- Motörhead, Eat the Rich
The Motörhead song was written specifically for the movie Eat the Rich, where protagonist Alex, a waiter in a high-class London restaurant named Bastards, after being fired for being rude to the upper class clientele (whose contempt he has had to endure daily) eventually returns to kill them and literally serve them up as food to other rich people in another restaurant, Eat the Rich.
The phrase ‘Eat the Rich’ however is attributed to the President of the Paris Communue, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette and his speech on 14 October 1793 in which he said:
“Rousseau était peuple aussi, et il disait: Quand le peuple n’aura plus rien à manger, il mangera le riche!”
“Rousseau, who was also one of the people, said: When the people shall have no more to eat, they will eat the rich!”
Discussions on economic inequality have tended, on one hand, to reflect a view characterised as a “zero-sum” game: where someone has obtained wealth at the expense of another, as captured by Bertolt Brecht in his ‘Alfabet’:
“Said the poor man with a twitch:
Were I not poor, you wouldn’t be rich.”
On the other hand, the alternative view, often derided as ‘trickle down’ economics, has concerned itself with ‘wealth creation’ linked with what economists refer to as ‘human capital’:
Among the most valuable assets in any nation are the knowledge, skills and productive experience that economists call “human capital.”
- Thomas Sowell
Recently, during a discussion with some friends, someone remarked “the rich always feed off the poor, especially in countries like India”. At the time, this was a passing comment in a much broader conversation, however subsequently, the statement played back in my head.
I grew up in England during the closing two decades of the 20th century. My family had arrived a decade earlier following the events of August 1972, when Ugandan President Idi Amin declared an “economic war” whereby businesses and properties owned by Asians and Europeans — mostly 2nd or 3rd generation residents in Uganda, albeit British citizens— were expropriated followed shortly by a decree ordering their expulsion.
These expropriated businesses were handed to Amin’s supporters, however as history subsequently showed, lacking the experience of their prior owners and proprietors — the “human capital” referenced in the above Thomas Sowell quote — the businesses were mismanaged and several collapsed, eventually pushing the Ugandan economy into a long and protracted decline.
A generation earlier, my maternal grandparents had survived the events of 1947 when India and Pakistan were partitioned. They had been born and raised in what is now Pakistan, which during their time would have been British India.
Although my mother joined my father in England during the late 1970s, her family moved to Delhi. In 1984, a series of riots as part of a wider pogram against the Sikhs living in Delhi followed the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. Although the events leading up to 1984 pogroms are usually discussed in communal, religious and political contexts, there also seems to have been an underlying socio-economic factor:
“N.C. Menon, who succeeded me as editor of The Hindustan Times, wrote of how Sikhs had “clawed their way to prosperity” and well nigh had it coming to them”
Khushwant Singh, Outlook Magazine 2004
The Central Bureau of Investigation, Indian’s main investigative agency, found the Delhi police and some central-government officials to have actively organised the violence.
These events suggest that the view typified by the ‘zero-sum’ game has the power to hold out as the stronger emotive force and in turn, the one with the stronger impact:
“When successful people with much human capital leave the country, either voluntarily or because of hostile governments or hostile mobs whipped up by demagogues exploiting envy, lasting damage can be done to the economy they leave behind”
- Thomas Sowell
In India, where economic inequalities are impossible to miss, anti poverty programmes have long been promoted by politicians. Most notable amogst these was the ‘Garibi Hatao’ or ‘Remove Poverty’ slogan of the Indira Gandhi government in 1971. It was a success for Mrs Gandhi insofar as it allowed her to garner national support across rural and urban poor voters and have herself elected.
In terms of outcomes, setting aside the rhetoric, several studies found India’s anti-poverty programs resulted in that only a fraction of intended funding (in some cases, less than 5%) going towards genuine anti poverty initiatives that actually reached the poor — otherwise, they simply served to provide a means for successful re-election for the politicians.
Subsequent Indian governments followed the pattern set by Indira Gandhi, expanding on the ‘Garibi Hatao’ to offer free (typically low quality) household items, ranging from utensils to phones, of which the key outcome seem to have been the creation of state dependence amongst the poor and a captured voting block for politicians.
In the 17 years following independence, under the Nehru administration, India’s compounded annual growth rate was less than 2%. By comparison, post war Japan, a country with over 70% mountainous terrain and lacking access to natural resources available to India, not to mention having been devastated from its involvement in the war, achieved a compounded annual growth rate just shy of 8% or 4 times that of India.
Some have cited the socialist policies followed by post independence India — the Nehru administration having been educated in English universities where such ideas were fashionable and deemed high brow amongst academia — as being a major driver of the corruption and retarded economic outcomes that have plagued India, however it would be incorrect to put Japan’s success to plain and simple laissez-faire free market economics: there is plenty of centralised and socialised economics in play there even today.
As with many things, there is not a magic silver bullet single factor solution to such societal problems and relying on a left wing or right wing political affiliation as some form of quasi religious substitute is unlikely to bring about the desired salvation.
Hesiod (his poem Work and Days) can be read as having realised that the basic economic problem is one of scare resources…choices have to made between work (which leads to wealth) and leisure. Hesiod even suggests that competition can stimulate production for it will cause craftsman to emulate each other…Hesiod describes himself as a farmer, and says that his father was forced to emigrate owing to poverty. The virtues he sees as leading to prosperity are thus — not surprisingly — hard work, honesty and peace.
- Roger E. Backhouse, The Ancient World, The Penguin History of Economics
Or to paraphrase, rather than ‘solutions’, effort may be better spent on weighing up the ‘trade offs’ — a theme that will be revisited in future articles.
For now, suffice to say, as history has repeatedly shown, who gets labelled the ‘rich’ or ‘poor’, very much depends on who is doing the labeling and for what purpose — as the aforementioned examples from India under the Ghandis and Uganda under Amin amply illustrate. In both instances, state sponsored violence occurred against communities who at one time would have been regarded as immigrant minorities, refugees or simply, ‘poor’ migrants and then conveniently described as ‘rich’ when it suited ‘demagogues exploiting envy’.