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The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats

ksen

ksen

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Calvinist
http://www.politico.com/magazine/st...ng-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html#.U7GV72cg-Uk

But let’s speak frankly to each other. I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?

I see pitchforks.
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would read again
 
He sees pitchforks in the near future. I am skeptical. He writes:

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.​

The problem with this prediction is that the pitchforks eventually come out for every society, with or without the inequality. Not just for inequality, but for any damn reason. Not one counterexample? How about Hong Kong? It ranks as the twelfth most unequal nation on the CIA World Factbook's GINI coefficient rankings, USA being #41. When the city was freed from Japan after World War 2, it had the same GINI score as the USA has today, and the inequality has been increasing ever since. Is it on the brink of revolution? Seemingly not. It is a prosperous nation and the target of immigration for poor nations all over east Asia.

Inequality is an ideological thing, playing on feelings of jealousy, but it is hard for most people to invest much in a jealous violent rage when they are making fifteen dollars per hour brewing coffee in Seattle. The super-rich can have as much money as they damn well please. Would it be any reason to storm their estates and lop off their heads with machetes? Their violent instincts can be satisfied by going home and wasting their friends with their necromancer on WoW. It takes much more than inequality. It also takes poverty, at the very least, and not first-world poverty but third-world poverty.

And, I am not much swayed by how the author flaunts his own ability to predict the future because he was lucky enough to pick two dot-coms where one of them didn't burst.
 
It's not inequality by itself that causes the trouble. It's a confluence of factors: The "more equal" animals invariably take over political rule. Their perceived interest drives a political agenda that fosters envy and suspicion among the ruled (to keep them divided and competing for dwindling benefits). Their paranoia grows along with their wealth: police state emerges from that paranoia coupled with divisive politics. Legal abuses increase in frequency and severity, to which the people respond with fear and loathing. The citizenry loses confidence in the electoral process and the law; the elite, removing economic regulations at will, siphon off a critical percentage of the nation's wealth. The system becomes less and less stable, divested of reserves and loyalty, tense and anxious, until all it takes to knock it over is one more war, recession or natural disaster.

Of course, this kind of society has traditionally invested a huge portion of its resources in military power, so there usually a standing army of considerable size, admirably well equipped and respected by the populace. If it also has relatively sane generals, martial law could see it through the crisis. Frankly, that's what I consider the last hope of a United States. Though disunion would probably work better.
 
ApostateAbe said:
He sees pitchforks in the near future. I am skeptical. He writes:

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.​

The problem with this prediction is that the pitchforks eventually come out for every society, with or without the inequality. Not just for inequality, but for any damn reason. Not one counterexample? How about Hong Kong? It ranks as the twelfth most unequal nation on the CIA World Factbook's GINI coefficient rankings, USA being #41. When the city was freed from Japan after World War 2, it had the same GINI score as the USA has today, and the inequality has been increasing ever since. Is it on the brink of revolution? Seemingly not. It is a prosperous nation and the target of immigration for poor nations all over east Asia.

Inequality is an ideological thing, playing on feelings of jealousy, but it is hard for most people to invest much in a jealous violent rage when they are making fifteen dollars per hour brewing coffee in Seattle. The super-rich can have as much money as they damn well please. Would it be any reason to storm their estates and lop off their heads with machetes? Their violent instincts can be satisfied by going home and wasting their friends with their necromancer on WoW. It takes much more than inequality. It also takes poverty, at the very least, and not first-world poverty but third-world poverty.

And, I am not much swayed by how the author flaunts his own ability to predict the future because he was lucky enough to pick two dot-coms where one of them didn't burst.
Click to expand...

this Hong Kong of which you speak, would this be the same Hong Kong that was ruled by Great Briton and is now under communist China's control? Think its proximity to and now its being controlled by China might have something to do with no pitchforks? take China out of the equation, think there would still be no pitchforks?
 
AthenaAwakened said:
Think its proximity to and now its being controlled by China might have something to do with no pitchforks? take China out of the equation, think there would still be no pitchforks?
Click to expand...
Are you suggesting China is a police state?
 
Has South-America not much more inequality? Unless there is a strong pitch fork organizer, the people will put up with a lot more than we might be able to imagine here.
 
AthenaAwakened said:
ApostateAbe said:
He sees pitchforks in the near future. I am skeptical. He writes:

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.​

The problem with this prediction is that the pitchforks eventually come out for every society, with or without the inequality. Not just for inequality, but for any damn reason. Not one counterexample? How about Hong Kong? It ranks as the twelfth most unequal nation on the CIA World Factbook's GINI coefficient rankings, USA being #41. When the city was freed from Japan after World War 2, it had the same GINI score as the USA has today, and the inequality has been increasing ever since. Is it on the brink of revolution? Seemingly not. It is a prosperous nation and the target of immigration for poor nations all over east Asia.

Inequality is an ideological thing, playing on feelings of jealousy, but it is hard for most people to invest much in a jealous violent rage when they are making fifteen dollars per hour brewing coffee in Seattle. The super-rich can have as much money as they damn well please. Would it be any reason to storm their estates and lop off their heads with machetes? Their violent instincts can be satisfied by going home and wasting their friends with their necromancer on WoW. It takes much more than inequality. It also takes poverty, at the very least, and not first-world poverty but third-world poverty.

And, I am not much swayed by how the author flaunts his own ability to predict the future because he was lucky enough to pick two dot-coms where one of them didn't burst.
Click to expand...

this Hong Kong of which you speak, would this be the same Hong Kong that was ruled by Great Briton and is now under communist China's control? Think its proximity to and now its being controlled by China might have something to do with no pitchforks? take China out of the equation, think there would still be no pitchforks?
Click to expand...
I think so. Hong Kong is part of the state of China in name, but very little changed in their politics and law.
 
Imnotspecial said:
Has South-America not much more inequality? Unless there is a strong pitch fork organizer, the people will put up with a lot more than we might be able to imagine here.
Click to expand...

The closest thing they got to pitchforks in South America is great socialist state of Venezuela. And it's the middle class in the streets. An irony that does not quite mesh with this article or ksen's socialist porn fantasies.
 
dismal said:
Imnotspecial said:
Has South-America not much more inequality? Unless there is a strong pitch fork organizer, the people will put up with a lot more than we might be able to imagine here.
Click to expand...

The closest thing they got to pitchforks in South America is great socialist state of Venezuela. And it's the middle class in the streets. An irony that does not quite mesh with this article or ksen's socialist porn fantasies.
Click to expand...

Can all of Venezuela's ills be attributed to socialism?
 
ApostateAbe said:
I think so. Hong Kong is part of the state of China in name, but very little changed in their politics and law.
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Mass protest in Hong Kong

Hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy protesters marched in Hong Kong on Tuesday, many calling for the city's leader to be sacked, in what could turn out to be the biggest challenge to Chinese Communist Party rule in more than a decade.
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link
 
The history of South America has not been entirely pitchfork-free. However, big bro with black helicopters has always been there to protect the worst dictators, snuff the most successful socialists and keep the oil and water and other precious substances flowing northward through private hands. Once the US gets too busy elsewhere....
 
I wish I could believe what this guy is saying, but I suspect the plutocrats will be just fine almost regardless of how bad things get for the rest of us.
 
Nexus said:
Mass protest in Hong Kong

Hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy protesters marched in Hong Kong on Tuesday, many calling for the city's leader to be sacked, in what could turn out to be the biggest challenge to Chinese Communist Party rule in more than a decade.
Click to expand...
link
Click to expand...
Awesome.
 
What plutocrats?

Pluto was expelled from the kingdom of the planets!
 
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