The rich. Mostly by buying politicians who help them avoid paying an equitable share of taxes.
What planet do you live on where that’s not happening?
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Well… the Gunpowder Plot had the intent to install a Catholic king. To integrate government with religion sounds kinda fascist-ish to me.
But James VI was already the head of the Church of England. Government and Religion had already been integrated, ever since Edward VIII (With the exception of Mary I).
Besides, that is more theocratic than fascist.
Open a private browsing window. Go read the article. It’s that simple. Excuses of no-track plugins and FB tracking are just that, lame excuses. Afraid that’s not enough? Create a new profile on your computer, read the article, delete the profile. You didn’t try.
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If you were advocating a Georgist approach, you could make some good arguments for it. A generalized “eat the rich” approach however, reeks of a Zimbabwe type future where people stop wanting to come here, and instead flee in droves.
Mark Blyth, a Keynesian economist I quite respect, has argued repeatedly and persuasively that we should have (and could have) let the banks fail. He thinks the bailouts ensured that our banking system, despite being massively deleveraged, is now considerably more concentrated than it was before and thus constitutes an even greater systemic moral hazard (he says things like “Citibank is now ‘even too bigger to fail’ than it was prior to the meltdown”).
I don’t know how to argue with that, and given the humanity of all the financiers involved, I’ve no reason to believe they won’t crack the system (and gain windfall government bailouts) again. I’m not out to demonize most of them, mind; I think the majority of “common folk” would do the same things in their situation (probably not UBS-style terrorism funding and cartel drug laundering, but almost surely predatory loaning and happy-fun-times debt vehicles).
Not sure on Blyth but I think he would agree with the “give people money” plan. He’s definitely in favor of taking on debt in declines and paying it off (i.e. raising taxes) in booms; a rather simple Keynesian view, really. “Give everybody some money to do something” seems like it would’ve been at least a better alternative than asset protection for the people that caused the crisis in the first place.
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Yea… one could say that we are the enablers. An analogous argument would be whether or not to provide an addict more drugs or denying them at the risk of potentially fatal withdrawal. Either way, you see that eventually the patient has a bad outcome. BTW, this is a little glimpse into the future, the addict will need more frequent administrations of ‘stimulus’ and at greater quantities.
“Why is that Bobby??” I hear you ask. Simple, stimulus pulls spending from the future into the present. Its all “fel temp reparatio”** for a while, but when that party is over, consumption drops and we need more money to keep it going.
See, “the system” is very good at getting us to debate the wrong questions. To wit: the question should not have been to ‘stimulate’ one way or another, it why should we have to stimulate in the first place. If not for the ability to create money by debt none of this, the mortgage bubble , the subsequent crash, and the need for stimulus would have occurred.
** I hope you realize the sweet irony of using a phrase minted on debased, or base metal, Roman coinage as the empire collapsed as an example of what is happening now.
Please go fight your straw man on some other playground. There’s a big fucking difference between “Eat the rich!” and “The rich should start paying their fair share of taxes again.”
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Yes, there is a bit of irony that the rich pay a lower percentage of taxes today than under Eisenhower, presumably the role model for the neoconservatives who fetishize the 1950s. The highest tax bracket in Eisenhower times was 91%. 91%! Of course this only applied to billionaires and the like, but compare that today where the same people are only taxed 40%. (Yes, I know in both cases this was only on the income they couldn’t hide, but still…)
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…you have a fully former dissenting opinion anyhow. Good show.
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Yes, they have indeed done well at slowing the march to fascism. Yet you revile them for being unable to stop it? Sigh.
Fear does terrible things to human thinking. Some people turn to guns. Others turn to facts. I have yet to meet a man who managed to turn to both at the same time.
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Modern capitalism runs on debt. I’m not sure I can picture the world economy running without the ability of banks to charge interest, an interesting thought-experiment for sure.
Is stimulus spending a drug, or is capitalism itself the drug here, since by its very nature it follows boom-and-bust cycles: with great highs come great lows, just like with drugs. Regulation had done a pretty good job of mitigating or taming that boom-bust cycle, but deregulation (the repeal of Glass-Steagall) or under-regulation (allowing opaque derivatives like credit default swaps) allowed big banks to take greater risks with the hope of bigger payouts. Perhaps gambling is a better analogy than drugs here.
And who pushed deregulation? The guy on the street wasn’t clamoring for the repeal of Glass-Steagall, it was those big banks, which brings us back to Straczynski’s “The New Aristocracy”-- we call ourself a democracy, but we are really an oligarchy, and they have all the power.
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Citation needed. I’ve been hearing since before his first term that Obama was going to take away our guns, in fact the NRA is still promoting this idea, but Obama’s second term is running out quick and yet gun sales are still booming.
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If you’re talking about being robbed of effective communication tools, being deluged with distractions, being under constant surveillance, then sure, right- they’re just looking after their own best interests. If you’re talking about having your guns taken away, then I don’t have much to say to you, besides no. They’re not trying to take away anyones guns, and guns ae the worst possible tool to try to use for this problem anyway.
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People hopped up on Thomas Piketty’s book are out for blood. They are enthusiastic for confiscatory rates of taxation to not just raise some revenue, but to destroy capital. Piketty speaks glowingly of the wealth destroying effects of the Great Depression and two world wars in levelling incomes. Fortunately, I believe people are basically good and will come to their senses once they have some time to think about all this. Such standard of living as lower and middle income people have today can easily be destroyed by Piketty type policies. Redistribution of wealth…why not?
But we have seen that in Europe feudalism and a decaying Roman empire pretty much continued through until WW-I
While I don’t really disagree with the sentiment of your overall post, as an historian I have to point out that these descriptions of classical society and feudal society move beyond oversimplification into just being wrong. The Greek world’s notion of franchise was very different from that of the Romans, and that of the Romans became by the 1st c. BC one of the most radically economically stratified (even more really than what we have today, if you can believe it) in history.
Moreover “Feudalism” was not an economic system – I think you’re referring to the manorialism of the Middle Ages. But even that was incredibly diverse across Europe in its implementation and the degree of individual freedom or empowerment that it entailed. It was, after all, the Middle Ages that saw the creation of new cities in which all were free…
Your point also seems to completely ignore the French Revolution (and the subsequent social change) that certainly undermined the “generational status” of the powers that be, both by simply taking their property (and although many aristocratic lands ultimately ended up in the hands of other wealthy individuals, the Church lands, which were a significant percentage of the overall property of France, did not). Perhaps most importantly the ideas that spawned the revolution (and the American Revolution) made a profound change in what was considered right and natural.
/rant
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Are you really stupid enough to believe people are “out for blood” simply because another economics textbook came out? Nonsense. The standards of living of working class and middle class people are being destroyed now by current policies, as most of us know from direct personal experience.
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You have really bought into the conservative narrative hook, line and sinker. They are scared because this book exposes them. Saying it’s ‘out for blood’ is equivalent of the ‘war on Christmas’ and other forms of irrational hysteria intended to get the masses into a froth so change never happens. Fear is their go-to weapon of choice.
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Jive turkey.
