Too Much On-line News Weekly, 5 Sept. 2011

[Excerpt]

Two weeks ago in Porto Cervo, a billionaire resort on the Sardinian coast, burglars snatched away almost $500,000 in cash and jewels from a holiday villa while a wealthy family slept soundly inside. The burglars actually made quite a racket. They took out windows to gain entry. But no one heard anything.

The police have a theory. Burglary victims in Porto Cervo, they note, have been waking up feeling “weak and dazed.” The police suspect sleeping gas.

Interesting theory. And sleeping gas, the more you think about it, could explain a great deal of what’s going on in the world today, not just the redistribution of wealth from billionaires to burglars. Sleeping gas could explain how households worth over $5 million — a mere 0.1 percent of the world’s population — have been able to grab, with hardly anybody noticing, 22 percent of the world’s wealth.

Of course, other explanations for this redistribution — from down below to the top — do exist. We examine, this week in Too Much, one of the more compelling. ...

Read the complete issue this week at Too Much On-line.