No, but the devil is in the details of how you prevent it, or kneecap him without also crippling the ability and incentive for people to become rich themselves?
I’m all for taxing the crap out of billionaires, but I’m against wealth taxes and that’s where the majority of billionaires’ wealth is.
The wealth is where their power comes from. If you’re not willing to tax that, it doesn’t seem like you’re willing to truly try and curtail that power.
As I’ve mentioned, yes, it’s an old argument. Definitely not the 10 years or so that you posited in the OP. What’s new is that in those past 10 years, the balance has shifted egregiously in favor of the oligarchs, to the point where even upper middle class folks like myself, who were perfectly content to let the system continue as it was back in, say, 2014, start to want major changes instead of the incremental improvements we had from roughly 1933-2014.
Yeah, this is an old argument, and way back, when it got too egregious, Roosevelt changed things to favor labor over capital in some small ways. And it worked! Inequality started coming down, workers participated more in the results of productivity gains, etc. Then, things started to go backwards to the point now where it’s worse than it was in the Gilded Age.
OP, you’re asking whether things are really different. The answer is yes – in the last decade or two, things have really changed – tax rates came down for the wealthy, there are more ways to avoid or evade taxes (and, the IRS has been kneecapped to make it even easier), billionaires pretend that their wages are actually capital gains so they get taxed at even lower rates. The list goes on.
So, yes, things are different.
True, but my students are often amazed and dismayed about how much is still the same when they read Marx’s Capital.
Fighting ignorance since the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt: it’s taking longer than we thought
Well, one should bring another old fashion idea… tax the rich.
Billionaires are bound by the whims of billionaires. That’s the only “free market” that matters.
The Peasants’ Revolt? Try the Servile Wars.
Even Henry fuckin’ Ford seemed to understand that if capitalists want a consumerist culture that makes them rich that need to pay their workers enough to actively participate in that consumerist culture.
Why would I not want to reduce the incentives to be rich? That’s the point: people put the desire to be rich over all other concerns. That’s been the problem throughout history.
There’s always going to be a desire to make more money, because “number go up.” What I want is to discourage it going too far, and hoarding wealth and harming the ability to have competition.
Sure, if rich means what I thought it meant as a kid, where you just have enough money you don’t have to worry and maybe some luxuries, then that seems acceptable. But what rich seems to actually mean is so far above that. It ultimately is about using money as power coupons.
And I oppose both forms of authoritarianism and oligarchy, whether via government or via monetary influence.
Ford’s main motiviation for increasing paying his workers a good wage, improving working conditions, and implementing a 40 hour work week was because he was facing an immense amount of turnover that was costly to his business. It’s hard to imagine someone like Jeff Bezos deciding its in his best interest to treat his employees better. (Not that Ford didn’t have some weird policies regarding employees.)
I blame Disney,
That’s middle class for the most part. Rich is really the level of wealth where your investment income is such that you don’t have to work for a living. Doesn’t mean you don’t do something work-like, but that you’re doing it entirely of your own choice.
Works for me! Heck, there were revolts in ancient Egypt
I think part of it is that people can communicate and can see through the divide and conquer tactics better.
Historically the ownership class (globally and domestically) have tried to divide the working class by race, religion, ideology, gender, etc. It normally works extremely well but I think a lot of younger people find it offensive that people are supposed to be distracted and angry about transgender people, immigrants, POC, secularism, etc so that its easier for the oligarchs to rob everyone.
I think a lot of younger people are more inclusive and the divide and conquer tactics to distract them and ally them with the plutocrats just make them angry. The point is I think the tactics that normally work to keep the public distracted aren’t working as well so all that anger isn’t being misdirected. People are more willing to direct their anger at the ownership class rather than at some marginalized othered group. Granted with the manosphere, some of that rage is being directed by men at women, so its still there for younger people.
I do remember in the 90s when there were tech billionaires like Bill Gates. He was seen as someone to emulate and hope to be someday. Society has changed for the better. Nobody earns a billion dollars, you steal it from the people who work for a company you own.
I think in the US at least, part of it is just semantics. A lot of people refer to oligarchy, plutocracy and regulatory capture as ‘capitalism’ and refer to scandanavian social democracy as ‘communism’. But the scandanavian systems are capitalist, just with more regulations and protections.
My understanding is Russia supports both left wing and right wing movements to try to create divisions. They will support MAGA movements, and they will also support militant armed black groups too. The goal is to empower both the ethnonationalists and their victims so they can destroy each other.
Its entirely possible Russia or China is helping to promote anti-capitalist messaging. I’m just not sure how they would benefit. Maybe a goal would be to cause anti-capitalist activists to have such high standards of what needs to be done to fix the problem, that there is no way any politician of any party could possibly meet those standards, causing apathy among the left about politics until they disengage.
FWIW I do remember there were endless pro-Palestine and pro-Gaza tiktok videos in 2024 and literally the day after the presidential election about 80% of them disappeared. So I’m assuming they were done to demoralize people on the left so it was easier for Trump to win. Maybe the anti-capitalist messaging is the same thing, to create a moral framework where people on the left feel both parties are the same and they don’t bother to vote, making it easier for the right wing to win elections. A right wing government benefits Russia (who promote and fund right wing movements in multiple NATO nations) but I don’t know if China benefits from a right wing US. China does benefit from the fentanyl crisis though, so there is that.
But if that is the goal of foreign agents, they are tapping into pre-existing anger about plutocracy and weaponing it by pushing it to the extreme level where people just stay home and don’t get involved in politics, by weaponizing despair.
No, Bill Gates was seen as someone who stole and got rich off of other people’s ideas, and Microsoft was seen as impacting the marketplace with illegal monopolization.
See, that’s exactly the sort of refrain that I never heard until the past few years.
And it’s demonstrably false, even if it is a feel-good and catchy thought. Many billionaires either founded and ran wildly successful businesses without walking over their employees any more than any other business, they inherited it, or they got really lucky.
That’s why I look at a lot of this stuff cock-eyed; it’s too glib and fits right into the narrative that the country’s adversaries would want to push. Not only that, it’s just not accurate. But it’s catchy and people like to believe it’s true.
Whether it’s true or not, no one should have the amount of wealth Musk has, since that amount means one’s whims can impact national security. We can make it illegal to be that wealthy, and we should.