"The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent" by CHRYSTIA FREELAND at the NY Times
The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percentby CHRYSTIA FREELAND at the NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/opinion/sunday/the-self-destruction-of-the-1-percent.html
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The story of Venices rise and fall is told by the scholars Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, as an illustration of their thesis that what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive. Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.
The history of the United States can be read as one such virtuous circle. But as the story of Venice shows, virtuous circles can be broken. Elites that have prospered from inclusive systems can be tempted to pull up the ladder they climbed to the top. Eventually, their societies become extractive and their economies languish.
That was the future predicted by Karl Marx, who wrote that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. And it is the danger America faces today, as the 1 percent pulls away from everyone else and pursues an economic, political and social agenda that will increase that gap even further ultimately destroying the open system that made America rich and allowed its 1 percent to thrive in the first place.
You can see Americas creeping Serrata in the growing social and, especially, educational chasm between those at the top and everyone else. At the bottom and in the middle, American society is fraying, and the children of these struggling families are lagging the rest of the world at school.
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pipewrench
(194 posts)Exhibit A is the bipartisan, $700 billion rescue of Wall Street in 2008. Exhibit B is the crony recovery. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that 93 percent of the income gains from the 2009-10 recovery went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. The top 0.01 percent captured 37 percent of these additional earnings, gaining an average of $4.2 million per household.
The system needs to be redirected back to a fair, open and honest government where all men and women are treated equally.
applegrove
(118,677 posts)aquart
(69,014 posts)With specific goal of ending the billionaire stranglehold.
They won't fight our wars. They can at least pay for them.
Squinch
(50,954 posts)pansypoo53219
(20,978 posts)as i read it in my 1891 encyclopedia britannica. the parallels to the bush era was great. but bush is louis XIV, or louis XV and cheeny was louis XIV. louis XVI was sort of caught by the backlash, tho marie antoinnette deserved it.
fasttense
(17,301 posts)"We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cant have both.
Louis Brandeis
U.S. Supreme Court Justice (1856-1941)