HOW TO SHARE YOUR WEALTH AND MAKE MONEY ?

 

Look carefully once again at the list of the wealthiest individuals in this issue and try to guess what was the most important event to affect the wealth of those on it.  The spring day when the person’s father made a sweeping gesture and said, “One day, all this shall be yours”?  Or was it the huge government tender he won?  Or perhaps the day she sold her company?

            The surprising answer actually has more to do with an event that took place more than one hundred and fifty years ago, in 1855.  It was in that year that the British parliament passed the hotly debated Limited Liability Act.  The new law limited the liability of shareholders to the sum of their investment and freed company owners and directors from financial responsibility for business failures or incapacity to pay debts.  The adoption of this law also removed the threat of personal claims against company directors as long as no laws had been broken.  Most of the American states had adopted the law by 1860 as well, and by the end of the nineteenth century it was accepted practice in most of Europe.

            The Limited Liability Act was designed to encourage financial growth and coax entrepreneurs into taking risks they would not otherwise take.  Opponents to the law at that time claimed that while the law was indeed meant to aid the economy it would in fact enable entrepreneurs to take risks whose realization would eventually be passed along to the entire society.

 

            The legal structure of a limited corporation has since that time become the most common business framework, and the right of entrepreneurs to enjoy their financial success while at the same time limiting their personal damage in case of failure is taken for granted.  But wait a minute: has society ever charged anything for the sweeping privilege it has bestowed upon entrepreneurs?  Income tax is not the answer; it is transferred to the authorities of a country in order to enable the citizens and businesses within its boundaries to live in safety and security and with a fair degree of personal freedom and various services.  But society has never charged for providing the right it has given to business people to take risks at its expense.  Hasn’t the time for that arrived?

            As for proper compensation, it is certainly possible to adopt the logic that led the enlightened legislators of the day and rely on the entrepreneurs and their descendants to be wise enough to select the most appropriate way of paying back their debt to society.  In fact, one does not even need a particularly fertile imagination; from among the thousands of social initiatives sponsored by nonprofit organizations today in Israel it is possible to find a suitable match for even the most finicky social tastes.  Belated compensation for limited entrepreneurial liability is, in my opinion, the main rationale for giving on the part of all those whose wealth derives from business.  And most wealth was generated in that manner.

            For those who would find it difficult to repay a one hundred and fifty year old debt, perhaps a few up-to-date figures would help.  A large and growing body of research conducted over the past few years carries a simple message: The level of societal problems in a developed nation can be explained first and foremost by the level of inequality of income among its citizens.  But it is important to understand that inequality has a strange characteristic of equality: we all suffer from it, even the rich.  Inequality is defined as the ratio between the average income of the top twenty percent and that of the bottom twenty percent in a given country.  In Sweden and Japan that ratio stands at 2-3; in the UK, 8; the United States holds the record at 9.  Israel, a relatively young country on the world map, has managed to bypass other far more developed nations and is ranked fourth highest in inequality in the world, right behind the US, Hong Kong and Singapore.

 

            The level of inequality has a direct effect, rather surprisingly, on a whole range of national indexes.  There is longer life expectancy in countries where equality levels are high, while crime and various social problems and personal disorders rise as inequality rises.  A baby born now in Spain – a country with a high level of equality, with a per capita GNP that is half that of the United States’ (and where public spending on health is the highest in the world) – has both higher life expectancy and lower infant mortality rates than those of the US, the country with the highest level of income inequality in the world.

There are noticeable differences from one country to the next with regard to mental disorders, particularly depression and anxiety.  In Germany, Spain, Italy and Japan – nations with relatively high income equality – only one in ten citizens was found to be suffering from any sort of mental disorder in the year preceding the study.  In Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK, where inequality levels are higher, the number is more than one in five, while in the United States the rate of those who suffer from mental disorders is more than one in four.  Researchers claim that the differences in income inequality from country to country are liable to triple the number of those suffering from mental disorders.