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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsI see pitchforks...
I see pitchforks...
But the problem isnt that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.
And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It wont last.
If we dont do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didnt eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. Its not if, its when....
Its the long-overdue rebuttal to the trickle-down economics worldview that has become economic orthodoxy across party linesand has so screwed the American middle class and our economy generally. Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real people who are dependent on one another.
Which is why the fundamental law of capitalism must be: If workers have more money, businesses have more customers. Which makes middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us, the true job creators. Which means a thriving middle class is the source of American prosperity, not a consequence of it. The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around....
The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor. So for as long as there has been capitalism, capitalists have said the same thing about any effort to raise wages. Weve had 75 years of complaints from big businesswhen the minimum wage was instituted, when women had to be paid equitable amounts, when child labor laws were created. Every time the capitalists said exactly the same thing in the same way: Were all going to go bankrupt. Ill have to close. Ill have to lay everyone off. It hasnt happened. In fact, the data show that when workers are better treated, business gets better. The naysayers are just wrong.
MORE:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html#.U60lUfldV_k
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2014/06/just-go-read-hanauer-today-by.html
Matariki
(18,775 posts)you'd think that would be obvious.
mindwalker_i
(4,407 posts)would be a good time to support the second amendment