The rich are parasites.
Kinda like our little friend here, the tongue-eating louse. Are you familiar with this horrifying little gal?
She is a parasitic isopod. The female of the species enters through the gills and attaches herself to a fish's tongue. She then eats and replaces the tongue, living inside the fish's mouth and getting first dibs on any food the fish eats. These lice can get pretty big! Are you grossed out yet? Hi little buddy!
In the original Greek the word parasite means "meal companion." Later on this word was applied to the animal kingdom. Any organism that feeds off a larger animal like a tapeworm or a leech or our pal the tongue-eating louse is known as a parasite.
In nature, smart parasites understand that it is in their best interest to keep the host alive for as long as possible. Nobody wants to stop that gravy train from rolling. But, like the rich, sometimes a parasite gets too greedy and runs the risk of killing the host.
Killing the Host is the name of an excellent book by economist Michael Hudson that forms the basis for much of this post. Please check it out for a much more in-depth discussion of all the ways the rich are parasitic and run the risk of killing the host, also known as our national economy, because of their greed.
Hudson writes,
"Familiar parasites in today's economy include Wall Street's investment bankers and hedge fund managers who raid companies and empty out their pension reserves; also, landlords who rack-rent their tenants... and monopolists who gouge consumers with prices not warranted by the actual costs of production."
Stock buybacks and dividends, Hudson describes, deplete rather than replenish the wider economy. Wealth is siphoned into the blood funnels of the rich rather than invested in tangible capital, research and development, or employment. As greedy parasites the rich prioritize their ill-gotten financial returns, hoarding wealth the economy needs to grow and thrive.
In nature parasites use sophisticated strategies to control their hosts, disabling their defense mechanisms. The goal is to take control of the host's brain in order to make the host believe that the parasite is helping, rather than hurting them.
Financial parasites do the same thing! But instead of releasing neurons or cytokines into our blood stream they use economics departments and free market theory. Hudson points out that mainstream economics is pro-creditor, pro-austerity, anti-labor, and anti-government. Anything that doesn't help the rich operate parasitically is denounced as socialism. Some of the money siphoned off by the rich is spent buying representatives in government and manufacturing consent to maintain this parasitic status quo.
The notion that there is a moral obligation to pay debts is one example of how the parasitic rich try and control the narrative. By convincing borrowers that their prosperity depends on paying bankers back we get a kind of Stockholm Syndrome situation, Hudson says, where debtors are encouraged to identify with their financial captors.
Hudson describes how the academic theories that support this arrangement frequently promise results that are the exact opposite of how the world actually works. He cites International Trade Theory, which pretends that any country can repay any amount of debt simply by slashing workers' wages. He writes, "This theory has been proved false everywhere it has been applied, but it remains the essence of IMF orthodoxy." Neoliberalism baby.
It doesn't matter that these theories are wrong, they help convince the host that everything is going great. Insurance companies, stock brokers, and the rest of Wall Street support bankers in their efforts to confuse financial parasitism with productive investment because they all benefit from extracting rents - taking without producing.
Taking without producing. The essence of what any parasite does. Feed off someone else. That's what the rich do. Without our hard work - what we do every day at our jobs - the rich would have nothing to siphon off for themselves. Because the rich don't create value - the working class does. That's why the rich are parasites.
Let’s make them pay.
The Rich are Parasites