But then I've always been cynical about the growing divide between the uber-wealthy and the other 99% of this country.
You can pay 10% of the population well enough that they support the top 0.01%, and the top 10% can pay the next 20% to 30% well enough or provide a sufficient probability to move up (or illusion) that they are incentivized to help suppress the remaining 60%.
I think some people don't quite understand what people are capable of when they are truly desperate. Right now, in most of the western world, people aren't at that point. But when they get there, billionaires' ability to hide on islands or yachts or whatever won't stop the inevitable. Any violent revolution is going to be very bad, even for the very wealthy who think they're insulated/protected.
IF you want to stop a revolution in 21st century just shutdown everything and blockade roads. How long till people start dying? A week?
What are the rebels gonna do? Assauls tanks and machine guns? Or starve/freeze/cook to death without electricity/oil/food?
The American delusion of aremd citizens defending constitution is just that - a delusion. In real life army mops the floor with small minority of suicidal rebels, and the rest begrudgingly return to their usual jobs because it's much better than starving and fearing for life every day.
They're talking about holing up in scattered rural dwellings and ignoring the law, with maybe the occasional terror attack mixed in. The Taliban has made a decent go of such a strategy so I don't it's an altogether risible position as you're implying.
I highly doubt average American will be OK with that.
We’ve seen it recently, where a single man shut down CNN and I think some other news stations just mailing poorly-made bombs to the media and politicians. We’ve seen it decades ago with Oklahoma City.
Could a Western population stand up against their government in a real fight? No. Could they inflect the same amount of damage without actually having to stand and fight? We’ve seen it before.
In any case, assassination is probably not the most effective means of wealth redistribution.
But 3 billionaires owning more than the bottom half of the country doesn't have to mean if the bottom half owns nothing:
>> "Their $264.1 billion in holdings outstrips the combined net worth of an estimated 160 million people"
Simply redistributing that would mean that everybody in the bottom half gets $1600. That's not going to fix poverty. It only underscores just how little that bottom half really has.
So that means if you completely equalize the wealth of the bottom 50% of the population after redistributing the wealth of these billionaires, the average person in that bottom half will still only have $3200.
So maybe they can get their car fixed, but they still can't send their kids to college.
Franz Ferdinand’s assassination changed a whole lot of systems.
Wars today are mostly cold or proxy, and rarely direct.
Second, look at history to tell you what will happen if the rich get disappeared. This happened in many communist nations. Doctors, lawyers, professors, bankers, wealthy landowners were mostly murdered and their wealth stolen from them. Did it work well for those nations? Are they thriving today?
That case always struck me as really odd. That guy was under surveillance the whole time and was caught in a sting operation. I think they even helped him build the devices. For what reason did they actually let him mail them? Surely, given that they were in on the entire plot, they could have simply arrested him before the devices were actually mailed.
He only has to take some material step forward in terms of the plot to get arrested for conspiracy as far as the law goes. Letting those reach the mailbox seems like a major failure on their part.
My point being in any destabiliztion event these groups are certainly going to be active, and being that they also have the exact opposite political ethos to the average gulliotine advocate, I'm willing to bet any uprising is not going to be so simple.
Think less French Revolution, and more Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia
Angry masses without a leader are not going to do anything.
The counterpoint is the richest Southern families quickly recovered their positions in the years after the Civil War [1]... but that relied heavily on racist policies, and of course these families still owned capital like land.
0: http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/assets/2015/07/fsm-irs-repo...
1: https://www.nber.org/papers/w25700?utm_campaign=ntwh&utm_med...
There are a few relationships between IQ and conscientiousness and wealth, but they break down towards the extremes are not strong enough in magnitude to account for even single-quartile mobility.
Source?
It tracks wealth by surnames and argues that the ability to gain (or regain) wealth is inheritable. This thesis is in contradiction to some of the ways I've experienced the world, but it is a source supporting the parent's claim. For my own political inclinations I'd be happy to hear many others that support the opposite claim.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691162546/th...
https://archive.org/details/CSPAN2_20151004_190000_Book_Disc...
https://www.worldcat.org/title/son-also-rises-surnames-and-t...
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=76BC054612F39ED6CBD...
Like say the Smith family was traditionally privileged and wealthy, but my great-great-grandfather lost his fortune. Am I actually any more likely to rise in fortune than the Jones' family next door that have been generationally poor for hundreds of years? Or does it only seem like that because I have many distant cousin's whose families maintained their advantages?
Second thing is that the fortune is typically not tracked here, because it’s really hard to get any historical data about fortune of any individuals, much less those not so famous. What Clark et al do is track status, and average out: for example, you can look at the people who graduated Oxford hundreds of years ago. As it turns out, their descendants today are overrepresented among UK’s doctors and lawyers. On the other hand, people carrying common job-related last names, like Smith or Taylor, are underrepresented as lawyers and doctors. In fact, in today’s UK, people carrying last names of Norman conquerors are still overrepresented among high status occupations in UK, although not by much, given a millennium of a regression towards the mean.
I recommend reading the book, it’s great.
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/8/8/20747198/philadel...
The entire Civil Rights movement is littered with examples of a police state and civilian mobs shooting, lynching, using dogs, water hoses, etc against its own citizens. It doesn’t take much to rile people up against “them” and get people to look the other way or even participate.
I don't know what that means. Guns are highly correlated with leathality and people believe in them completely. Generally, a population may not want to have possession of guns. That quickly changes for a large percentage in survival mode. Effectively, many criminals are perpetually in survival mode.
I would bet if the far right were making this type of threat, it wouldn't be brushed under the rug.
But it's also a reminder that if the powerful people in society offer too much resistance to the change the people need, at some point the only way to get that change is by extreme overreaction.
Personally I'd rather see the revolution happening by the soap box or the ballot box rather than the ammo box, but when media and voting systems get gamed and corrupted while people's rights and needs keep getting trampled upon, at some point a more violent solution may become unavoidable. But that's going to be very hard to steer and have many harmful side effects.
Imagining that the richest can hold a country like the US hostage is preposterous.
Destroying the system would do more damage, but so far it's been their system that enables their accumulation of wealth. There are a lot of poor people who want to destroy that system.
[1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...
[2] https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...
what?
There is a far-left opinion that there should be no such thing as a billionaire, that a single human's marginal tax rate should hit 100% at some point. I wouldn't say "never" to the idea at this point.
Bernie supporters are generally the least likely to get their hands dirty and do the kind of work necessary to build and maintain infrastructure. Pretty much everyone I meet that does that kind of work is Republican. Not saying this is a universal truth, but it's a somewhat accurate generalization.
Source for party affiliation by a sampling of occupations:
It's not like our infrastructure problems are new, or weren't remarked on before 2016. They've been building for decades. They were there in the Obama administration, and the Bush administration, and the Clinton administration, and the other Bush administration, and the Reagan administration. Do you think the problem through all those years was our critical shortage of leftist construction workers?
If you scroll past the 1:1 comparisons and hit expand all, there's a much bigger list of occupations, many of which would fall under the "people building infrastructure" umbrella.
Looking at those jobs it seems like it leans a bit right, but overall is fairly balanced.
You'd expect most jobs to be roughly 50/50 divided between Republican and Democrat. (Actually, I'd expect a big chunk Independent. What happened to those?) Some lean so strongly to one side that it makes me wonder what's going on there.
Environmentalist strongly Dem and oil worker strongly Rep makes sense. I suppose high-paying jobs with authority like pilot leaning more Rep whereas service-oriented jobs like flight attendant leaning more Dem is also understandable.
But farmers lean Rep, but once they retire they lean Dem. Why? I'm a bit surprised to see stay-at-home moms as well as most religious professions lean strongly Dem. I mean, to me it makes sense that religious people lean left, but it often sounds like many Americans feel exactly the opposite about that. I guess I'm glad to see these stats make more sense than the news.
But in skilled trades, I absolutely don't understand the reason for the large differences. Why would a locksmith or machinist lean to strongly Rep, while sheet metal workers and cartographers lean so strongly Dem? I can't think of any good reason for that difference.
I see a lot of inspectors and rafety/regulation related professions lean somewhat Dem, but safety director leans very strongly Rep.
And what's the difference between a landscape contractor and a gardener? Or a landscaper and a garden designer? Could it be that some people choose to identify by a particular professional label based on their political leaning, rather than the other way around?
And how representative are the various groups? If you asked only 4 horticulturists, it's easy to get 3/4 of them leaning one way or the other. How many book publishers did they ask that all of them are Democrats? Surely there are also Republican book publishers?
Also looking through your other comments, you seem to question peoples' sources on things without providing any for your own.
For posterity, the link was added after I commented and he probably downvoted me.
It's the democratic basis that gives a government its legitimacy.
Obama ordered drone strikes on Americans. Reagan ran Iran-Contra. Kennedy tried to invade Cuba. FDR tried to grow the Supreme Court to 13.
A better approach would be for the federal government as a whole - yes, all three branches - to reign in their power so that there's less power to abuse. The odds of that are zero.
Instead the Us is rife with regulatory capture, unenforced antitrust laws, etc.
If the democracy were representative, and the public informed, things would be better.
What are they going to do if they dismantle, say, Wal-Mart? Now all the people who worked there have no jobs and the people who shopped there have one less source of goods. Sure, we might be fine without it due to the alternatives, but once you go down that road, you find out that you've ripped up a complex system of logistics that moved goods to places that people wanted them and that you don't have any sort of replacement planned.
But that's usually what happens in these revolutions, they rip everything apart and then try to replace it with something better and fail. But next time will always be better, right?
People on the right often claim to be for the free market and for small, decentralized government, but then turn around and love big, centrally planned conglomerates,just as long as they are owned by share-holders and are ruled with an authoritarian hand.
You underestimate, vastly, just what they've done to their supply chain, distribution network and logistics to make it that efficient and therefore cheap for their customers. It's part of the reason people switched from buying from local shops and went to them instead.
I chose them as an example because business people know a lot about what they did and the general public doesn't have a clue. I don't even like Wal-Mart, but I'm also aware of some of the reasons they're so successful. They're literally studied by people who study supply chain management because of what they did, e.g. -
https://www.skubana.com/walmart-leading-way/
I used them because it's fashionable to hate them, but anyone who knew what they had actually built that's not visible to the public would know that it's not something that you can just replace that easily. So that lets me separate the replies according to how informed they are.
Finally, your attempt to connect large companies to "central planning" is at odds with the fact that one works and the other does not. Central planning doesn't work because different people have different needs and no single plan can accommodate so many unique individuals. I don't think you will find many businesses that aren't planned, but they're not managing so many unique needs, either. And in those times when they really do end up in a situation like that, they end up being spun off as separate companies for that very reason.
Eventually, the small stores join up together to bargain for a wholesale price lower than market price to their suppliers, and thus earn a higher margin.
ala, what you see at walmart today.
They have the massive capital to build a megamart anywhere they want, and have it run at a loss for however long it takes to drive everyone out of business. This absolutely kills local businesses and funnels money out of the area, leaving only the low wages paid to the local Walmart staff. And because it's Walmart job or no job, people have no bargaining power.
When small businesses form cooperatives for collective bargaining, they keep ownership local, they keep jobs local, and they keep the stores in the city centres running, which is better for pedestrian and public transit access, not to mention cafe life and local bars/eateries. Compare this to a megamart outside the city where you have no choice but to drive there. You get everything there and have no real reason to go into the city. As a consequence, city life dies out.
Coops and associations work with the local shop owners and communities, whereas megacorps trample and replace them with cookie cutter faceless megamarts.
And no, I don't think the supply chains are actually more robust for local stores. I've had better luck at the local Wal-Mart than at other stores for TP and other hard-to-get items. If anything, early on, some people weren't checking the smaller stores, but after they got wiped out, they've yet to recover and yet Wal-Mart has.
There are still supply chain issues, don't get me wrong, but mostly they're upstream a bit from the customers. Think of things like meat packing plants having trouble finding any way to operate safely or having a lot of production that had to shift from commercial packaging to retail packaging and distribution.
Walmart is so big that it utterly dominates the market, to the detriment of everyone else. But because they're able to sell everything at the lowest price, people go there. It's impossible to compete with Walmart.
It's a clear example of why the invisible hand of the free market is a dangerous myth.
Economy of scale is not at all the same as monopoly power and conflating the two only makes your point more confused.
Finally, the "invisible hand" is really just a survival of the fittest type effect. It's every bit as random and imperfect as that is in nature, but the effects are no less real, or we'd all be peasants living at 1800s level standards instead of typing to each other on a globe-spanning computer network.
If anything, I'd say that Socialism is the dangerous myth. Always promising utopia, as if you can create a utopia with unconstrained mass murder from a Socialist revolution. If we were the right kind of people to live in that utopia, we'd be sharing our stuff willingly right now, not seeing talk of guillotines and forcibly taking stuff, as can be observed in this very story. The proper way to get closer to that would be to encourage people to share and be generous.
As the song says, first it was a tragedy, now it's a farce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwqnRYPcrl0
They can afford to this due to their enormous size and domination of their suppliers, which means they can sell their wares at lower prices than anyone else. They can afford to bleed money for as long as they have to, in order to win in an area.
That is almost the textbook definition of a local monopoly, facilitated by sheer size and entrenched market position on a larger scale. They are so large that they can have everything in all of their stores, they don't have to worry too much about certain items not being profitable in certain areas, because they're big enough to carry everything everywhere, unlike smaller local stores, who cannot afford the space nor the losses.
Walmart banks hard on the convenience of everything being available in the same store, which is something they can only do because of their sheer clout and economies of scale that only work for really big powerful companies.
The end effect is that Walmat (and other similarly huge chains) drive smaller businesses out of the market, because a free market always rewards those who dominate others, and rewards domination by affording even better tools and methods for dominating competitors. It's a surefire way to make sure the market is owned and run by just a small handful of very large and powerful entities.
A truly free market is one that is sensibly regulated, in order to foster competition and prevent monopolies from taking over, according to Adam Smith, not one that is completely unregulated, as many free market proponents seem to argue for.
So it's not a monopoly at all, they just offer things at cheaper prices and drive more expensive businesses out of business, while many reasonably efficient competitors still exist.
As a consequence of this, local businesses die, jobs are lost and people either have to move away or accept Walmart jobs with well-documented bad pay and bad working conditions.
All of this is a deliberate business strategy by Walmart, because the US political climate and "business-friendly" ideology from both major parties prioritizes giant corporations with enormous lobbying power, over small business owners.
As a further local effect, business life is driven from the city centers to outside the cities, causing fewer people from the suburbs to go into the city centers, leading to urban neglect and decay.
They don't have control over the supply of any particular good, it's not like an ISP where they have covenants with local governments that limit competition, they're not Standard Oil. They're not even at the level of Microsoft, because there's not much they can do to exclude competition.
But I guess some people have tried this tact, before. Here's an article which discusses many of the points you've made and explains why they don't make sense:
https://truthonthemarket.com/2006/07/10/the-unconvincing-ant...
Honestly it seems you either refuse to read what I wrote, or you are invested in a free market ideology. The link you posted is nothing more than a hard-libertarian free market fanatic opinion blog, heavy on snark and lacking in value.
Read about the damage Walmart does to communities and why even their mere presence in the market completely distorts it:
https://money.com/walmart-stores-closing-small-towns/
https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/09/radiating-death-how-wal...
https://popularresistance.org/new-report-wal-mart-destroys-l...
https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2013/03/28/1197622/-The-Walma...
This goes for all megamart chains, Amazon and the like, but Walmart is among the very worst.
That's why I don't see what good "dismantling" them does. Say someone offs Google tomorrow. The website dies and we're left with a bunch of people who have no job and some servers and buildings and whatnot that are less useful to anyone than when you started.
To the extent that consumers do have a choice, that is somewhat true, but the examples of Facebook and Amazon are as much incredible luck of being in the right place and the right time, exponential explosion of brand new modes of communication and commerce, and all kinds of unintended consequences. Again, to say the middle class "signed up" for this is hardly the case.
At the very least there are issues of power and information imbalances. Take the example of someone comparing the price of something at Amazon and the same thing at a local bookstore and deciding that it's worth the $0.50 savings to go with Amazon. It is easy -- and incorrect -- to say, "well, they signed up for the massive corporate supply chain consolidation and the dissolution of many local economies' autonomy that transactions like this will precipitate when performed at a large scale."
The average consumer simply doesn't have the access to data that corporate boards and politicians do, nor do they have the historical and statistical training to make an educated analysis of their implications.
Finally, even though there are people and organizations who urge alternative consumer patterns, the reach and the volume of their message pales in comparison to the marketing, PR and advertising armies employed by large corporations and their political allies.
The average consumer doesnt need to be given a bachelor's degree in economics to make a choice on making a company bigger or smaller with their purchase. I know people who support smaller business and it is independent of education.
Amazons offer to the end consumer, is not a hard sell. Theres no drug dealing physical addiction, nobody wakes up with a horses head in their bed and no guns held to people's head. The offer is buy an item that costs money. That's it.
People sign up. They want 0.50c cheaper with overnight delivery. The people see the benefit and convience of internet shopping and choose it. Small businesses failing to keep up and relying on thinking of the population as dumb and unlucky to force redistribution of wealth are not helping their own case.
Many small businesses have succeeded massively off the same medium amazon is using, the internet and it's not 'luck'.
They're not owed in a fully capitalist system, but I can see some merit for the idea that inequality has gotten so bad that there needs to be external intervention to fix that, and redistribute the wealth that is currently concentrated in the top 1%. Giving normal people that money would be a good thing for the economy, and I can see some benefit to it.
Now of course in practice it wouldn't be legal and getting that money from them would be near impossible, but its interesting in theory.
The rich are the first to encourage a witch-hunt against the rich. It drives up business.
(In fact, Marx considered Russia the least likely candidate for a communist revolution; it would start in England or Germany.)
Why would anyone in their right mind give up their life for a revolution under these conditions?
Then again, judging by the downvote happy people here, there may not be enough braincells left for a successful revolution.
In that world, why bother innovating? Why bother investing in innovation when the risk-free play has a huge positive expected return?
The stimulus is intended to protect jobs and livelihoods, not to react to movements in the stock market (even if the current president seems to think so)
For better or worse, agreed or not, the US' gov diverted - for now? - an implosion. The Fed can't eliminate risk. It also can't guarantee future returns.
More than $3 billion for "research and development of vaccines, as well as therapeutics and diagnostics"
$2.2 billion "in public health funding to aid in prevention, preparedness and response efforts — including $950 million to support state and local agencies"
Almost $1 billion for "medical supplies, health-care preparedness, Community Health Centers and medical surge capacity"
$1.25 billion to fight COVID-19 internationally.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_Preparedness_and_R...
I'm referencing the CARE Act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_Aid,_Relief,_and_E...
Granted the one you reference was passed prior, the CARE Act was introduced first. The CARE Act was never in danger of being dropped, as the market was counting on it (it is filled with pork).
[0]: https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/04/investing/fed-junk-bonds-etfs...
[1]: https://twitter.com/TruthGundlach/status/1256352949787176960
You invest for a return. Stopping a slide yesterday has little to do with getting a return tomorrow.
The future. New products. New ideas. Etc. That's where a return comes from. Not the Fed.
The FED only steps in for once in a lifetime risks that impacts the market broadly. Any risk specific to individual firms, which is all the risk between these broad market events.
[0]http://www.adriendavernas.com/papers/valuationofbanks.pdf
Those risks overlap. It's not effectively once-in-a-lifetime, as of the last century.
Also, I know it is hip to say that Wall Street is short-sighted, but in reality it is one of the the few fields where people routinely think decades at a time.
If you run a large pension fund or investment account you were already risk-weighted and if the cash isn't needed for 10+ years you'd much rather own a slice of the world's largest companies ten years from now instead of gold or cash under a mattress.