The best among the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so … Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. - Oscar Wilde

What was the real difference between Europe and America, at a macroeconomic level? Europeans were reinvesting their own surplus in each other — that is all that “socialism” really is. Americans were handing their surplus over to capitalists — and hoping capitalists would reinvest it in them. After all, that is what their economists and intellectuals said would, could, should, must happen. But why would capitalists ever invest in people — instead of skimming off the cream? They are not in it to be nice to people, after all — their motives are not benevolence, social development, justice, or even a sense of decency. Capitalism’s goal is simply maximizing profit — and so those surpluses weren’t reinvested in people, they were handed over to owners and heads of companies, mostly, in the form of spectacular payouts and IPOs and parachutes. For what work, precisely? Figuring out ways to maximize profit, relentlessly, every single month — at any cost to anyone else, not to anyone’s benefit. Hence, capitalists got mega-rich, while the average American’s life began to decline into misery. https://eand.co/how-capitalism-made-americans-poor-and-socialism-made-europeans-rich-6eb7b52353a

Art by Kevin Zhu

Kevin Zhu is a 22 year old rogue visual engineer from the San Francisco bay area. He investigates the interaction of abstract shapes with organic processes, and creates artwork through a fusion of nature with technology. By bridging the gap between a computerized future and an organic past, his art is reminiscent of the dizzying paradox that is the modern world. Creating original content for visual event production has led to a constant slew of intriguing things, which are then delivered on Tumblr via kevzhu on a daily basis.