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.
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%.