The thing that people don’t always keep in mind is that the extreme wealth inequity that allows people to worry about keeping their multi-million dollar art collection on their super yacht (and is almost never acquired in a completely benign fashion), actually does kill people.
It’s not as obvious as if Mr. Moneybags actually walks up to someone on a crowded street and shoots them in the face, but let’s use Walmart as an example. If you manipulate the system so your workers aren’t technically full time (and don’t qualify for benefits), and they make a low hourly wage, they often can’t afford quality health care. How many people have suffered and died because they can’t access the best health care for financial reasons? The list goes on, but I think you get the point.
So wealth redistribution by guillotine is unfortunately the eventual outcome when society becomes a bit too bloated at the top. The question isn’t if it’s going to happen (there are plenty of historical examples that it’s damned near inevitable), it’s how bad are things going to get before it happens?
I don’t entirely agree. More often than not the guillotine results not in wealth distribution, but in musical chairs of wealth and power. Disorganized revolution almost never lifts the working poor. It opens a power vacuum into which the Robespierres and Stalins step. The only difference is that the mega-rich finally suffer with the people they’ve been systematically screwing over.
You’re basically correct that it’s inevitable if no one does anything. But the mega-rich are not going to try to change anything because it will cost them their ill-gotten wealth and power. They’ll simply try increasingly desperate gambits to preserve their position, as in the subject of Cory’s post.
The only way to actually change the fate of society is organized revolution. Unfortunately, the working classes have been so conditioned to focus on their individual powerlessness that their collective power, far greater than the individual power of the mega-rich, seems to them a fantasy. Meanwhile, the mega-rich have come to believe they are masters of their own fate, blind to the destiny that the anxiety of their avarice binds them to their and our collective ruination. Everyone wants to believe in the promised land.
There may well be some choice pickings mixed in with the dross; but I would second the dross report. At work we generate a surprising amount of paper(and it remains literal paper; in addition to the electronic backups) in the long-term retention classes(some ‘life of product + 10 years’, some ‘50 years’, some ‘life of company’) and it all gets dutifully boxed up and sent off to Iron Mountain.
Legal lives in fear of someone demanding a full audit. Not because there are suspected of being any lurid bodies buried; but because exhuming all the banal ones would be terrifyingly expensive.
Organized and Disorganized revolutions are defined after the dust settles. I have (some) faith that the lessons from revolutions in France, Russia,and China have not gone ignored by those planning the next round.
