Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/11/05/appleby-bermuda.html
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And do remember a minimum $15.00 an hour & Medicare for all would reek havoc over the financial world.
[note sarcasm]
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Wow ! Now that’s what I call breaking news ! The wolrd will never be the same after that ! (most depressed sarcams here).
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Nothing new. Aren’t pirates supposed to have buried treasure?
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“Avoision. It’s a word. Look it up !”
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Guys, guys, calm down. It will all start trickling down any day now.
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Anyone know a good place to buy tumbrels? Something with a bulk discount, preferably.
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I understand if you use pitchforks, it pours down.
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Inb4 “how much more taxes do you pay than you have to” libertarians who aren’t necessarily temporarily embarassed millionaires, but do make the grave category error of thinking they have more in common with billionaires than welfare recipients. It’s a strange world when half the population can frame wanting enough money to live without working* as so heiniously greedy that we must expend all of our political power to prevent it, but expecting more money than the budget a small city in exchange for the work of one person is just natural, due compensation…
*or so goes the welfare boogeyman
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I completely agree. I also think, though, that on the wealthy-people side, we’re seeing an interesting phenomenon as well.
That is, there’s been a lot of power disruption amongst the elites in the last 20-30 years. The “old money” is being drowned out by the new, and this is having interesting consequences. First of all, the vast majority of the new money is comprised of the information economy, which itself is broadly composed of white, Asian and Indian well-educated folks who grew up either upper-middle class or upper class.
The old money is almost completely white and has been an entrenched upper class for a long time. They were the old ownership class in America, and suddenly their vast fortune, with few exceptions, now looks like peanuts compared to these uber-wealthy startup guys.
There’s going to be a lot of resentment there, for one, but also this means that suddenly the values of the new are clashing with the old, and that’s going to have some weird results. First of all, the new money isn’t going to know a lot of the “real story” of how power functions at that level; they’re still going to think a lot in terms of high school civics classes or what bits and scraps they picked up along the way. This would theoretically lead to a lot of them supporting a loud, authoritarian populist and oh hey that’s exactly what happened.
The other way around, you’re going to get a lot of xenophobia as the old whites that used to run everything are now coping with a lot of non-white people being richer than them and “invading their space”. Also would be happy to support a racist populist and… Yep, we can check that box as well.
Hopefully this was the lesson a lot of people needed: that they’re not as smart as they think, and that being a tech genius doesn’t in any way cross over to knowing Sweet Fanny Adams about politics or economics or social issues or any of this other stuff, because there’s nobody with a more bloated ego than a newly wealthy twenty- or thirtysomething that thinks they’re one of the new Gods of Olympus.
It’s funny, just the other day I started having flashbacks to scenes from Bonfire of the Vanities because of how much all these folks remind me of the main character lately. Maybe we should read from it at sentencing when some of Trump’s cabinet starts getting thrown in jail?
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And every billionaire on the planet says in unison: BUT MUH Return on investment! XD
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It’s stuff like this that turned me into a mutualist. If the rich can’t accept that for capitalism to continue there must be some redistribution of wealth from time to time (even if minor or temporary) then they’re just signing the death warrant of the system they cherish. Basically, they’re bad stewards of their own estates. I only hope they continue to worsen conditions to make it logically and emotionally impossible for anyone to try to save capitalism.Only then can there be any kind of permanent correction of our state of affairs.
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