(no subject)
Jul. 22nd, 2010 03:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsA reader on Andrew Sullivan's blog comments:
I know this is going to piss off some of my readers, but I honestly think that there's been a long-running class war in this country, between a congealing "meritocracy" that maintains its position by encouraging a social groupthink, and the rest of us.
Warren Buffet started the conversation when he said, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." The rich class is engaged in the practice of wealth generation capture; it's not that these people create significant capital or root out significant inefficiencies, but that they're successfully exploiting the inefficiencies of the human brain-- inefficiencies that can't be overcome-- and tying up potential competition, in order to ensure that their portfolios continue to rise and everyone else's continues to fall.
Inequality has never been greater in this country; you cannot convince me that the wealthy class deserves and ever-growing share of the wealth generated in this country because they themselves produce the ever-growing economy.
Unfortunately, there are 50 to 70 million Americans "who would voluntarily vote themselves and their families into living in a cardboard box under an overpass, roasting sparrows on an old curtain rod over a tainted wood fire, as long as their vote ensures that the gay, black, Hispanic, Muslim, liberal or whatever in the next cardboard over doesn't even get the sparrow or the fire."
I find it impossible not to comment that everything Frum says about Israel applied to US support for, and dependence on, the Apartheid-era South African regime. ... Confirmation of the superiority of a market economy? Check. You only have to ignore that, in both countries, the benefits of that superior economy only applied to the chosen people.I likewise find it impossible not to comment on the way the same is true in America: the benefits of the "superior market economy" only apply to the chosen people: in the case of America, though, the chosen people are simply those who are wealthy. Economist Lane Kenworthy submits this graph:
I know this is going to piss off some of my readers, but I honestly think that there's been a long-running class war in this country, between a congealing "meritocracy" that maintains its position by encouraging a social groupthink, and the rest of us.
Warren Buffet started the conversation when he said, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." The rich class is engaged in the practice of wealth generation capture; it's not that these people create significant capital or root out significant inefficiencies, but that they're successfully exploiting the inefficiencies of the human brain-- inefficiencies that can't be overcome-- and tying up potential competition, in order to ensure that their portfolios continue to rise and everyone else's continues to fall.
Inequality has never been greater in this country; you cannot convince me that the wealthy class deserves and ever-growing share of the wealth generated in this country because they themselves produce the ever-growing economy.
Unfortunately, there are 50 to 70 million Americans "who would voluntarily vote themselves and their families into living in a cardboard box under an overpass, roasting sparrows on an old curtain rod over a tainted wood fire, as long as their vote ensures that the gay, black, Hispanic, Muslim, liberal or whatever in the next cardboard over doesn't even get the sparrow or the fire."
