| Funny and quite true. And it is also true for many other countries, with a mostly poor population. All over the world, one of the big benefits of wealth is the ability to build your own "island" or castle. But here's an interesting question. If we force everyone with wealth and power to live like the masses, then the only way to improve their lot would be to improve all of society or emigrate. Would we then see a much stronger push against corruption and bad economic policy? This is obviously a purely intellectual exercise for fun. Some people believe that at some point a country's oligarchy will try to improve things for everyone at least a little bit. This is a very naive view of wealth and power in a chaotic country. The only ones who can, and some times do, push for reform are the masses. But mobilized masses have short attention spans and can never push for important details. The details remain the devil's domain. This is why masses can get rid of dictators, but everything after the dictator is a painfully slow grind of minuscule improvements. I believe a slow grind of minuscule improvements describes India's past 50 or so years quite well. Things are improving, just not nearly enough within any one human life time. |
I think this is called comunism (as Marx intended, not as was executed in the USSR, Cuba, and any other place in practice).
The problem with this is that if you don't allow for the existence of official channels the rich can use to improve their lot then there is no point in being rich, so most people will either not bother and work as little as they can to live or find unofficial channels where they can have power to improve their lives (see the communist parties in the former USSR and China).
Of course, communism can arguably work, but how to do so is still an open problem.