United States of Entropy Part 2

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That's being challenged daily with all the unemployed twenty-somethings that were told they would "deserve" job if they finished college. There are numerous highly intelligent, highly educated people sitting on the sidelines of the economy because of technology and corporate greed.

The current system of "dues" and "reward" is outdated - designed for a different age.

I don't think these are the same thing. Perhaps it's splitting hairs, but entitlement for entitlement's sake (or, deserving a job just because they went to college) =/= being paid more because your job is (insert all those adjectives/other adjectives from the other post). The greed aspect, CEOs and whatnot with exorbitant salaries in respect to other "more deserving" professions, yeah, change that. But then you get into the partisan head butting where everyone starts their misplaced screaming about communism...and that's where this entire discussion falls apart.
 
Now which religion teaches that joy is found in money or coveting the possessions of another?

You've heard about those "Christian" pastors who say that God wants us to be rich, yes?

I don't know about the other religions, but I get the impression that Buddhism at its core does not insist joy if found in money. After all, the Buddha was a prince who left his palace to live a very simple life, after realizing true peace cannot be found in being rich.
 
I can understand your skepticism about mankind. We've certainly earned it. I suppose I remain optimistic about technology it because it seems that there are only two real possibilities: A Star Trek-type future or human extinction. Since it's not much fun thinking about our demise, I'm concentrating on my future application to Start Fleet (after they've restored my body to 22 year old health and vigor).

Your scenario rings of Brave New World (perhaps without the castes) to me to be honest. A World State of no war, competition or want. Only distractions, entertainment and SOMA.

There's also the whole men ruled by apes milieu by the way. :wink:
Yes, and I contend that if every human being was guaranteed food, shelter, and safety - we would see an absolute explosion of creativity and service.

Sorry but a guarantee of positive rights requires the involuntary servitude of others to provide the provisions of the right. Authoritarian Marxist governments introduced the notion of positive rights which stand in stark contrast to our constitution of negative rights (protections) from government tyranny.
 
Your scenario rings of Brave New World (perhaps without the castes) to me to be honest. A World State of no war, competition or want. Only distractions, entertainment and SOMA.

There's also the whole men ruled by apes milieu by the way. :wink:
Dystopian stories always sell more than utopian ones. Just like everyone reads Inferno and Paradise Lost instead of Paridiso and Paradise Regained.

We will certainly have issues in the future. Who knows what battles/struggles we will face when start reaching out into the galaxy and beyond.

Sorry but a guarantee of positive rights requires the involuntary servitude of others to provide the provisions of the right. Authoritarian Marxist governments introduced the notion of positive rights which stand in stark contrast to our constitution of negative rights (protections) from government tyranny.

Marx wanted to violently take the means of production away from the ruling class and place into the hands of the working class. What technology is doing - is putting the entire means of production on your desk (3D printers and then nano-assemblers). Are you against this? Or do you think it is vital that most humans waste a good portion of their life struggling month to month at jobs they hate? How is this not involuntary servitude (our only choice is which master to serve). How does the current economic system fulfill the promise of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?
 
Marx wanted to violently take the means of production away from the ruling class and place into the hands of the working class. What technology is doing - is putting the entire means of production on your desk (3D printers and then nano-assemblers). Are you against this? Or do you think it is vital that most humans waste a good portion of their life struggling month to month at jobs they hate? How is this not involuntary servitude (our only choice is which master to serve). How does the current economic system fulfill the promise of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Human technology has always evolved and always will evolve. However, I wonder if our future jobs will only consist of operating and repairing computers. I'm sure that won't be the case, but it seems like it. That won't be easy for anyone who doesn't have the brain to do computer science or IT. I don't know what can be done in the future.

As for struggling month to month with jobs we hate, yeah, its sucks. I'm working as an admin and I know I'll be in this field for a long time. I get to do what I love - writing - on the side, which is a plus. But I fear that I'll be wasting my potential working jobs for financial purposes. Granted, those purposes are good ones - saving for retirement, a house, future kids' college education, etc. Admin jobs can pay very well, and some places have good pensions or even discounts if you work for a hotel or a phone company. So that's a bonus, and I'll go with that until who knows. Maybe I'll get lucky and be able to do what I love full time while making good money and benefits. I could also prove myself worthy for a certain position in a department of whatever company I'm doing admin work for. There are possibilities out there, and nothing is set in stone, unless you make that way. Until then, work for the money you will definitely need in the future. It would mean less stress, and having less stress means some happiness and better health.

Sorry for the ramble, but that's the conclusion that I am at right now.
 
Marx wanted to violently take the means of production away from the ruling class and place into the hands of the working class. What technology is doing - is putting the entire means of production on your desk (3D printers and then nano-assemblers). Are you against this? [/quote[

Remember when a computer in every home and business was going to free us up? How's that working out?
Or do you think it is vital that most humans waste a good portion of their life struggling month to month at jobs they hate? How is this not involuntary servitude (our only choice is which master to serve).

Not to say some jobs just aren't for some people but if one can't find some job they like or find some level of satisfaction in any job I'd say they have what's called in the business world "an attitude problem."

Servitude is a nice word for slavery, i.e. work for others with no compensation. Hardly the same as a societal expectation for healthy people to work for their food, clothes, home, etc.

How does the current economic system fulfill the promise of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Seems ours comes the closest seeing as people migrate here from all over the world in pursuit of these.

Anyway, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are natural rights that no government can legitimately withhold and must in fact protect. Not to mention these rights have been perverted from their original meanings.

The founders saw life, liberty and pursuit of happiness as God-given rights; the rights of individual sovereignty (including anti-slavery), the freedom of religious conscience, freedom for one to provide for their family, freedom from harassment from the government and the right to private property legitimately earned according to one's talents and initiative.

Certainly not the collective guarantee of leisure time or freedom from want you seem to imply from your posts an economic system should provide.
 
Remember when a computer in every home and business was going to free us up? How's that working out?
Not as well as it could. We are certainly more productive per hour - but the "maximize shareholder value no matter what" mentality has kept us working 40 plus hours a week. It isn't the fault of the technology.

Not to say some jobs just aren't for some people but if one can't find some job they like or find some level of satisfaction in any job I'd say they have what's called in the business world "an attitude problem."
Here is where I'm a bit optimistic. I think that once people feel secure that their basic needs are met, they will work vary hard at the things they are passionate about. Who know - there might be another Shakespeare out there who's too bogged down by working two part-time jobs just to stay off the the street.

Servitude is a nice word for slavery, i.e. work for others with no compensation. Hardly the same as a societal expectation for healthy people to work for their food, clothes, home, etc.

It's a sliding scale. Is it is bad as antebellum South slavery? Of course not. Can we do better? I believe we can.

Seems ours comes the closest seeing as people migrate here from all over the world in pursuit of these.
I love quite a bit about America. I still serve to protect her on a part-time basis. That doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement.

Anyway, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are natural rights that no government can legitimately withhold and must in fact protect. Not to mention these rights have been perverted from their original meanings.

The founders saw life, liberty and pursuit of happiness as God-given rights; the rights of individual sovereignty (including anti-slavery), the freedom of religious conscience, freedom for one to provide for their family, freedom from harassment from the government and the right to private property legitimately earned according to one's talents and initiative.

Certainly not the collective guarantee of leisure time or freedom from want you seem to imply from your posts an economic system should provide.
I still contend that not enough people are truly free to explore one's talents. Leisure is not the same as the freedom to work on projects you feel that you're passionate about to have the new time to develop new skills to meet new technical demands - not to mention the pursuit of hobbies that may trigger new inventions or beautiful art.
 
Maybe some of you have already read this or heard about this. But I'm posting this anyway:

America is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes to its society, its economy, its politics. There are definitely two Americas. I live in one, on one block in Baltimore that is part of the viable America, the America that is connected to its own economy, where there is a plausible future for the people born into it. About 20 blocks away is another America entirely. It's astonishing how little we have to do with each other, and yet we are living in such proximity.
There's no barbed wire around West Baltimore or around East Baltimore, around Pimlico, the areas in my city that have been utterly divorced from the American experience that I know. But there might as well be. We've somehow managed to march on to two separate futures and I think you're seeing this more and more in the west. I don't think it's unique to America.
I think we've perfected a lot of the tragedy and we're getting there faster than a lot of other places that may be a little more reasoned, but my dangerous idea kind of involves this fellow who got left by the wayside in the 20th century and seemed to be almost the butt end of the joke of the 20th century; a fellow named Karl Marx.
I'm not a Marxist in the sense that I don't think Marxism has a very specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it wasn't attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you might solve that.
You know if you've read Capital or if you've got the Cliff Notes, you know that his imaginings of how classical Marxism – of how his logic would work when applied – kind of devolve into such nonsense as the withering away of the state and platitudes like that. But he was really sharp about what goes wrong when capital wins unequivocally, when it gets everything it asks for.
That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress.
We understand profit. In my country we measure things by profit. We listen to the Wall Street analysts. They tell us what we're supposed to do every quarter. The quarterly report is God. Turn to face God. Turn to face Mecca, you know. Did you make your number? Did you not make your number? Do you want your bonus? Do you not want your bonus?
And that notion that capital is the metric, that profit is the metric by which we're going to measure the health of our society is one of the fundamental mistakes of the last 30 years. I would date it in my country to about 1980 exactly, and it has triumphed.
Capitalism stomped the hell out of Marxism by the end of the 20th century and was predominant in all respects, but the great irony of it is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of partisan or philosophical perfection.
It's pragmatic, it includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works because we don't let it work entirely. And that's a hard idea to think – that there isn't one single silver bullet that gets us out of the mess we've dug for ourselves. But man, we've dug a mess.
After the second world war, the west emerged with the American economy coming out of its wartime extravagance, emerging as the best product. It was the best product. It worked the best. It was demonstrating its might not only in terms of what it did during the war but in terms of just how facile it was in creating mass wealth.
Plus, it provided a lot more freedom and was doing the one thing that guaranteed that the 20th century was going to be – and forgive the jingoistic sound of this – the American century.
It took a working class that had no discretionary income at the beginning of the century, which was working on subsistence wages. It turned it into a consumer class that not only had money to buy all the stuff that they needed to live but enough to buy a bunch of shit that they wanted but didn't need, and that was the engine that drove us.
It wasn't just that we could supply stuff, or that we had the factories or know-how or capital, it was that we created our own demand and started exporting that demand throughout the west. And the standard of living made it possible to manufacture stuff at an incredible rate and sell it.
And how did we do that? We did that by not giving in to either side. That was the new deal. That was the great society. That was all of that argument about collective bargaining and union wages and it was an argument that meant neither side gets to win.
Labour doesn't get to win all its arguments, capital doesn't get to. But it's in the tension, it's in the actual fight between the two, that capitalism actually becomes functional, that it becomes something that every stratum in society has a stake in, that they all share.
The unions actually mattered. The unions were part of the equation. It didn't matter that they won all the time, it didn't matter that they lost all the time, it just mattered that they had to win some of the time and they had to put up a fight and they had to argue for the demand and the equation and for the idea that workers were not worth less, they were worth more.
Ultimately we abandoned that and believed in the idea of trickle-down and the idea of the market economy and the market knows best, to the point where now libertarianism in my country is actually being taken seriously as an intelligent mode of political thought. It's astonishing to me. But it is. People are saying I don't need anything but my own ability to earn a profit. I'm not connected to society. I don't care how the road got built, I don't care where the firefighter comes from, I don't care who educates the kids other than my kids. I am me. It's the triumph of the self. I am me, hear me roar.
That we've gotten to this point is astonishing to me because basically in winning its victory, in seeing that Wall come down and seeing the former Stalinist state's journey towards our way of thinking in terms of markets or being vulnerable, you would have thought that we would have learned what works. Instead we've descended into what can only be described as greed. This is just greed. This is an inability to see that we're all connected, that the idea of two Americas is implausible, or two Australias, or two Spains or two Frances.
Societies are exactly what they sound like. If everybody is invested and if everyone just believes that they have "some", it doesn't mean that everybody's going to get the same amount. It doesn't mean there aren't going to be people who are the venture capitalists who stand to make the most. It's not each according to their needs or anything that is purely Marxist, but it is that everybody feels as if, if the society succeeds, I succeed, I don't get left behind. And there isn't a society in the west now, right now, that is able to sustain that for all of its population.
And so in my country you're seeing a horror show. You're seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you're seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You're seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we've put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.
We have become something other than what we claim for the American dream and all because of our inability to basically share, to even contemplate a socialist impulse.
Socialism is a dirty word in my country. I have to give that disclaimer at the beginning of every speech, "Oh by the way I'm not a Marxist you know". I lived through the 20th century. I don't believe that a state-run economy can be as viable as market capitalism in producing mass wealth. I don't.
I'm utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument's over. But the idea that it's not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn't going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that's astonishing to me.
And so capitalism is about to seize defeat from the jaws of victory all by its own hand. That's the astonishing end of this story, unless we reverse course. Unless we take into consideration, if not the remedies of Marx then the diagnosis, because he saw what would happen if capital triumphed unequivocally, if it got everything it wanted.
And one of the things that capital would want unequivocally and for certain is the diminishment of labour. They would want labour to be diminished because labour's a cost. And if labour is diminished, let's translate that: in human terms, it means human beings are worth less.
From this moment forward unless we reverse course, the average human being is worth less on planet Earth. Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and the socialist impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine that is capitalism.
Mistaking capitalism for a blueprint as to how to build a society strikes me as a really dangerous idea in a bad way. Capitalism is a remarkable engine again for producing wealth. It's a great tool to have in your toolbox if you're trying to build a society and have that society advance. You wouldn't want to go forward at this point without it. But it's not a blueprint for how to build the just society. There are other metrics besides that quarterly profit report.
The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my country passionately and we're going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I'm astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not?
If you watched the debacle that was, and is, the fight over something as basic as public health policy in my country over the last couple of years, imagine the ineffectiveness that Americans are going to offer the world when it comes to something really complicated like global warming. We can't even get healthcare for our citizens on a basic level. And the argument comes down to: "Goddamn this socialist president. Does he think I'm going to pay to keep other people healthy? It's socialism, motherfucker."
What do you think group health insurance is? You know you ask these guys, "Do you have group health insurance where you …?" "Oh yeah, I get …" you know, "my law firm …" So when you get sick you're able to afford the treatment.
The treatment comes because you have enough people in your law firm so you're able to get health insurance enough for them to stay healthy. So the actuarial tables work and all of you, when you do get sick, are able to have the resources there to get better because you're relying on the idea of the group. Yeah. And they nod their heads, and you go "Brother, that's socialism. You know it is."
And ... you know when you say, OK, we're going to do what we're doing for your law firm but we're going to do it for 300 million Americans and we're going to make it affordable for everybody that way. And yes, it means that you're going to be paying for the other guys in the society, the same way you pay for the other guys in the law firm … Their eyes glaze. You know they don't want to hear it. It's too much. Too much to contemplate the idea that the whole country might be actually connected.
So I'm astonished that at this late date I'm standing here and saying we might want to go back for this guy Marx that we were laughing at, if not for his prescriptions, then at least for his depiction of what is possible if you don't mitigate the authority of capitalism, if you don't embrace some other values for human endeavour.
And that's what The Wire was about basically, it was about people who were worth less and who were no longer necessary, as maybe 10 or 15% of my country is no longer necessary to the operation of the economy. It was about them trying to solve, for lack of a better term, an existential crisis. In their irrelevance, their economic irrelevance, they were nonetheless still on the ground occupying this place called Baltimore and they were going to have to endure somehow.
That's the great horror show. What are we going to do with all these people that we've managed to marginalise? It was kind of interesting when it was only race, when you could do this on the basis of people's racial fears and it was just the black and brown people in American cities who had the higher rates of unemployment and the higher rates of addiction and were marginalised and had the shitty school systems and the lack of opportunity.
And kind of interesting in this last recession to see the economy shrug and start to throw white middle-class people into the same boat, so that they became vulnerable to the drug war, say from methamphetamine, or they became unable to qualify for college loans. And all of a sudden a certain faith in the economic engine and the economic authority of Wall Street and market logic started to fall away from people. And they realised it's not just about race, it's about something even more terrifying. It's about class. Are you at the top of the wave or are you at the bottom?
So how does it get better? In 1932, it got better because they dealt the cards again and there was a communal logic that said nobody's going to get left behind. We're going to figure this out. We're going to get the banks open. From the depths of that depression a social compact was made between worker, between labour and capital that actually allowed people to have some hope.
We're either going to do that in some practical way when things get bad enough or we're going to keep going the way we're going, at which point there's going to be enough people standing on the outside of this mess that somebody's going to pick up a brick, because you know when people get to the end there's always the brick. I hope we go for the first option but I'm losing faith.
The other thing that was there in 1932 that isn't there now is that some element of the popular will could be expressed through the electoral process in my country.
The last job of capitalism – having won all the battles against labour, having acquired the ultimate authority, almost the ultimate moral authority over what's a good idea or what's not, or what's valued and what's not – the last journey for capital in my country has been to buy the electoral process, the one venue for reform that remained to Americans.
Right now capital has effectively purchased the government, and you witnessed it again with the healthcare debacle in terms of the $450m that was heaved into Congress, the most broken part of my government, in order that the popular will never actually emerged in any of that legislative process.
So I don't know what we do if we can't actually control the representative government that we claim will manifest the popular will. Even if we all start having the same sentiments that I'm arguing for now, I'm not sure we can effect them any more in the same way that we could at the rise of the Great Depression, so maybe it will be the brick. But I hope not.
 
People Not In Labor Force Soar To Record 91.8 Million; Participation Rate Plunges To 1978 Levels | Zero Hedge

Curious why despite the huge miss in payrolls the unemployment rate tumbled from 7.0% to 6.7%? The reason is because in December the civilian labor force did what it usually does in the New Normal: it dropped from 155.3 million to 154.9 million, which means the labor participation rate just dropped to a fresh 35 year low, hitting levels not seen since 1978, at 62.8% down from 63.0%.
And the piece de resistance: Americans not in the labor force exploded higher by 535,000 to a new all time high 91.8 million.
Somebody google 1986 and see if extending unemployment benefits was the hot-button issue 5 years into the Reagan recovery.
 
And I doubt age discrimination and unemployment discrimination was not so rampant back then.
 
The unemployment report this month was awful. I've heard that some of it may be cold-related, but given that the polar vortex didn't happen until January, I doubt it was very much. It'll be interesting to see what numbers for January and February are like. If we're back in 130k/month territory, then fine, but I hope this isn't the start of a trend.
 
It was awful. It saddens me that so many have given up. I won't blame them, but they just can't give up. Maybe take time to process their despair, and then get up and try a new strategy. There needs to be encouragement not to give up, even if so much is against them.
 
Oh, great: United States falls out of the top ten for economic freedom � Hot Air

United States falls out of the top ten for economic freedom

It’s not hard to see why the U.S. is losing ground. Even marginal tax rates exceeding 43% cannot finance runaway government spending, which has caused the national debt to skyrocket. The Obama administration continues to shackle entire sectors of the economy with regulation, including health care, finance and energy. The intervention impedes both personal freedom and national prosperity.
See, electing a president who promotes bigger government, more entitlements, more regulation, more taxes and income redistribution through a larger welfare state has consequences.
 
Yes, REGULATION is the problem. Of course. Yes. This is a fact you cannot debate, you guys. REGULATION has CONSEQUENCES. If we continue to REGULATE we'll be LESS FREE in RANKINGS and GAYS MIGHT GET MARRIED and that also has CONSEQUENCES. You should FEAR these things.
 
Let's have way less regulation, that way 2008 can just be the appetizer.
 
Lot of socialist countries there having similar economic freedoms to the US, like Sweden, Germany, Finland. I mean your choices at the moment are Australia and Canada but then they have socialised healthcare.

This economic freedom measure doesn't really seem to measure much, maybe just the political opinions of the numb skulls who invented it.
 
But at what cost?? Flying death monkeys, transgender people in toilets, Martian Socialist invasion?
 
Where are these socialist countries you speak of? I would like to move to them.
 
Kim Jong Un is actually a worker and is just trying to confuse the rest of the world.
 
Where are these socialist countries you speak of? I would like to move to them.

Purely speaking in perception terms.

Anyway I'm convinced North Korea is a true socialist state. What we see is a holographic projection to fool the world, while everybody else is living underground in untold splendour.
 
It would be really funny if North Korea really were some amazing utopia where everyone is wealthy and happy beyond their wildest dreams, and our media were the ones tricking us.
 
If the NK propaganda photos were actually indicative of everyday life. :lol:
 
Great piece from Chrystia Freeland, a member of Canadian Parliament:

2013 was the year the rise of the plutocrats made it to the top of the international agenda. Witness the remarkable consensus at the year's end of the world's centers of faith, power and money: Pope Francis published an apostolic exhortation criticizing the "economy of exclusion", US President Barack Obama named income inequality as the most important issue of our time, and New York, the global capital of the plutocracy, elected a mayor who won by attacking the "tale of two cities" the metropolis lived through during the political reign of its incumbent billionaire boss.

This recognition that surging income inequality is an urgent political problem marks an important shift. That's because the widening gap isn't a new story. Income inequality in much of the world has been rising for three decades. But until the 2008 financial crisis, and the global recession which it triggered, there were some plausible ways to deny -- or at least to hope -- that the rise of the 1 percent wasn't a problem.

The strongest argument was that even though those at the very top were pulling away from everyone else, people in the middle and even at the bottom weren't doing too badly either.

Globalization and the technology revolution, the story went, hadn't only created the vast fortunes of the 0.1 percent, they had improved the lives of the 99 percent with more and less expensive goods and services. That thesis was partly a chimera, magicked into being by the consumer credit bubble which created the temporary illusion of middle class prosperity. But this explanation was also powerful because it was partly true -- familiar goods from cars to t-shirts are cheaper and longer-lasting than ever before, and all our lives have been transformed by the internet and mobile communication.

Once the credit bubble burst, though, our wonderful new devices and consumer goods weren't enough to mask the other reality of the big economic transformation of our time -- the hollowing out of middle class incomes and jobs. It is this fact -- that, in a time of abundance, middle class incomes are stagnating and employment is anemic -- that has transformed rising income inequality from an academic issue into a political one.

And that is why 2013 was the year the revolt against the plutocrats began. Make no mistake -- this is a powerful and consequential political moment, which is being felt across the western industrial democracies and whose impact is only beginning.
You see it in the US in the election of Bill DeBlasio as mayor of New York, and, just as significant, his blessing by the Clintons at his inauguration; in California Governor Jerry Brown's successful tax increase on the rich; in the emergence of Elizabeth Warren as one of her party's leaders; and in the despair of leading Republican thinkers, like Frank Luntz, who believe the left has won the national argument on income inequality.
You see it in France in the new 75 percent tax on the super-rich. You see it even in Switzerland, long the discrete home of the world's money, which has passed a law giving shareholders a binding vote on CEO compensation.

For anyone who cares about democracy -- and that should be all of us -- this populist backlash is deeply reassuring. One of the big fears prompted by the economic rise of the plutocrats was that they would inevitably capture political power, too. It is, after all, hard to disagree with Louis Brandeis's warning, at the height of America's first Gilded Age, that "we can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both".

Today, Brandeis may again be turning out to be right, but not in the way he had feared: rising plutocratic economic might has certainly led to an attempt to gain political sway, but it isn't working very well. Instead, the plebes are fighting back.
There's an arithmetic inevitability to what's happening -- money can buy political voice and encourage the cognitive capture of the political elite. But in democracies, the electoral math is ultimately denominated in demographics not bank balances. Any politically free system which cannot economically deliver for the vast majority of its people -- and, today, that means our own -- will be challenged.

The big question for 2014 will be how the plutocrats respond. Some are still in denial. Today's economy is going so well for those at the very top that it can be hard to see how badly it is working for those in the middle and at the bottom.

That blinkered vision is exacerbated, ironically, by the sense of personal virtue and personal achievement felt by so many of today's super-rich. This is not the fading aristocracy of Downton Abbey, barely hanging on to the spoils accumulated by its ancestors. Many of today's plutocrats made their own fortunes, and they have the pride and the self-confidence that comes with that accomplishment. They believe they have contributed to the common good to boot, which is why the complaints of the 99 percent feel to them not just bewildering and threatening, they also unjust.

It's no surprise that the angry 99 percent and their public champions have little sympathy for this bruised amour-propre. The prevailing sentiment is closer to the mood the last time income inequality soared and the masses fought back. The plutocrats didn't like it then much, either. To which FDR, born to wealth but leading the charge to create a more inclusive capitalism, replied: "We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me -- and I welcome their hatred."
It may be that today, as in the 1920s and 1930s, a bitter political fight between the economic winners and losers is inevitable. But it would be better for everyone if the plutocrats join in the effort to create capitalism that works for all us, rather than resisting it.

For one thing, in today's competitive global economy, the countries and communities that succeed will be the ones that keep their homegrown plutocrats, and attract more of the right kind from elsewhere. The stagnant middle class won't be revived by an exodus of the super-rich -- what it needs is an entrepreneurial elite which has chosen to share.

In an age when both capital and capitalists are global, that's a tall order. But in the long run, it will be in the best interests of the plutocrats, too.

In the 1920s and 1930s, it was those economic elites who compromised with the rest of society, as they ultimately did in North America and western Europe, who fared best.
Compare their fates with their cousins who were defeated by communist revolutionaries, or who won the pyrrhic victories, and self-exile in gated communities, of the super-rich in Latin America. We may need our plutocrats, but they need us, too.

Thanks to Pope Francis, Revolt Against the Global Super-Rich Is Underway | Chrystia Freeland

I wonder how far along the fight against economic inequality will go. Its exciting to see many take a stand against it, but it is a very hard problem to solve.
 
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