I think almost all problems we discuss every day: political divide, millennial job prospects, student loan debt, drug crises can be traced to wealth inequality. At it's core, all these problems evolve from unfettered capitalistic pursuits. The middle man taking their cut of student loans and having no means to resolve that debt through bakruptcy. No growth jobs that offer no safety net. For profit schools, prisons and healthcare allowing those at the top to accumulate wealth by depriving more people of what was once considered a community benefit. We yell that the other side has it wrong while owners of gun manufacturers escape any civil liability and providers of medicare admin routinely overbill, then pay fines less than the wealth accumulated. Opiates provide an opportunity to escape what seems unescapable. I am not sure the answer but the framing is continually wrong.
I agree with just about all of what you said. So many bad things are tied to this. Crime rate. Horrible educational results and environments (I worked in Baltimore schools as a contractor and it's one of the saddest experiences I ever had and I'm a combat vet).
One thing to remember though about the war on drugs and especially the opiate crisis is that it was also largely a creation of the CIA who learned it from the Brits who had been doing it as far back as the opium wars. Black markets provide black money budgets not overseen by Congress, and the CIA really hates oversight (they prefer overlook committees). The main opiate crisis in particular stems from Vietnam, where generals would play along for a cut while the CIA had drug operations all over including Laos, etc. They'd then ship it back and sell it specifically in the inner (mostly black and other minority) city.
The same thing is true of this opiate crisis. The war in Afghanistan has massively increased poppy production (which the taliban had outlawed) while US forces would eradicate weed crops they allowed poppy fields, and low and behold, the vast majority of the heroin, etc now in America can be traced (Chem analysis) right back to Afghanistan. I promise you it's Vietnam on repeat, and the CIA has their hands all over it.
Of course south America is the same. Behind every top cartel member is a CIA man pulling their strings, and look at the destruction they are wreaking on the border towns. The death toll of civilians is higher than allied casualties in OIF!
It's just like Iran contra. Since lots of the time they don't want to pay full price, the Intel agencies will ship arms to them as well.
It's high time for a new church committee!
The problem is the surveillance engine is so pervasive, which enables the blackmail and extortion system, just about every senator or congressman who pushed back would be quickly compromised.
This is the real deep state, in the Peter Dale Scott sense of the term, and it must be addressed if we are going to strike at the root of many of our problems, instead of hacking at the branches.
I disagree with just about everything you said and would argue nearly the opposite: too much state involvement in education, healthcare, and the economy is to blame for the deteriorating society.
Children are forced to conform to the state's schooling program from a very early age, and those who fail to do so are labeled as such with bad grades and trips to the school office. They are humiliated in front of their peers and feel powerless and dehumanized. This record follows them through their entire schooling career. The religious and cultural traditions of their parents are ridiculed by the authority figures at school. School zones keep poor children out of good schools.
Wealth inequality will naturally arise in any system, but when gains go to the politically-connected or well-lobbied, then the state is artificially enriching those at the expense of others. This is not the functioning of capitalism but rather of cronyism and corruption.
Student loans are out of control precisely because the government got in the business. Higher education costs are out of control because of the excess money from the student loans.
The job prospects suck because of excess regulation in the economy. Entrepreneurs are not able to innovate as well due to so much red tape. Occupational licensing sets up barriers at all levels of the workforce, enriching the incumbents and limiting competition. Healthcare is so overrun with regulation it's laughable to mention the word "market" in the same sentence. Those are barriers put in place of market forces by the state.
The drug epidemic is merely the result of all these forces put together.
Singapore has one of the world's highest income inequalities and faces virtually none of those problems. Distilling it down to "income inequality" is reductionist, political scapegoating.
> I think almost all problems we discuss every day: political divide, millennial job prospects, student loan debt, drug crises can be traced to wealth inequality.
I would put one caveat on this: it's due to wealth inequality that doesn't come from having created more wealth. All of the examples are of people not creating wealth, but accumulating it by transferring it from other people to themselves. That kind of wealth inequality is bad not because wealth inequality is bad in itself, but because our society as a whole needs people to be creating wealth in order to continue to exist; so if all of the smart, talented people find they can get more wealth by transferring it from others instead of creating it, our society will eventually collapse.
