According to some people, the Jews would take over everything. Buses wouldn’t run on Saturdays and pork, Christmas, and Easter would be all outlawed.
Moral of the story: Hold on to your democracy as if your life depended on it.
Generally speaking, when you make a claim the polite thing to do is back that up with a relevant cite. Otherwise it’s simply bullshit rhetoric and contributes nothing.
So I went out and did your homework for you and found the exit poll data for Prop 8:
that’s a cite, if you were wondering what it looks like
Oddly enough, when viewed by income, the top earners voted almost the same as the bottom earners. With a narrow group of people earning $30-75k and then $100-150k breaking the balance towards the yes vote.
Since the results of the vote were 52.24% to 47.76% I’m not sure I’d consider that a useful reference.
Then would you willing to support a “populist” socially conservative protectionist candidate-ie Pat Buchanan?
Er… no?
My impression has been that globally plutocracy has always been associated with socially conservative authoritarian regimes. Military juntas, monarchies, corrupt democracies, etc.
Social liberalism seems to come out in societies that do not have massive social discrepencies and wedge issues. I don’t think it has to do with plutocracy.
If anything, in a true plutocracy you’d assume the plutocrats would be driving stakes into every wedge issue they could (christian vs. non christian, white vs. non-white, womens lib vs traditional roles for women, gay vs. straight) to keep people distracted and disorganized.
Would the number of delegates per state be adjusted so that the more wealthy states had more congressmen than poorer ones?
I think that you would generally see a great decrease in power of the religious right. The Republican power brokers only keep them around because they bring in large numbers of not particularly affluent but very fervent votes. They also tend to be rural while the money is concentrated in cities. The tax system would become the new form of gerrmandering. Those in power would tax themselves just enough to stay in power, while at the same time enacting legislation to enrich themselves. This could be continued in an ever increasing spiral until basically we end up with a feudal type society with a rich aristocracy that can do what it pleases and a large underclass that has no power; that is until the eventual revolution and reign of terror.
On the contrary to keep the proles well in line, you can grant them all sorts of social license for sex and drugs. It should be noted some of the most notorious plutocracies such as pre-Castro Cuba were “sin islands” for American tourists.
See, folks? Plutocracy has its benefits!
It makes more sense to go to plausible causal correlations, and look at the vote breakdown by education level – for obvious reasons, ignorance correlates to both low income and narrow-mindedness.
That makes sense as a causal effect in one direction (wealth causes open-mindedness).
I suspect that causal effects in the other direction also contribute – e.g. somebody who is unwilling to do business with people who have black or gay or girl or whatever cooties is at an obvious economic disadvantage relative to a rational actor.
While I commend you for including the evidence that refutes your position (the R&R was for foreign tourists, not locals), you still would have gotten credit for honesty if you’d inserted enough padding to make the admission against interest less glaringly obvious.
He’s almost crazy. I wouldn’t vote him for dog catcher. He would shoot stray dogs and feed them to school kids at lunch.
Here’s the point. While it was for American tourists, in Cuba for instance the prostitutes, etc. were Cubans, which the authorities tolerated.
Given the obvious fact that prostitution takes place under every form of government known to man, with at least the implicit permission of the authorities (on the actual pavement-pounding level, if not the nominally policy-making level), what is this supposed to have to do with the subject?
Teddy Roosevelt warned us about allowing huge fortunes dropping into the hands of the wealthy when he made a push against cutting the inheritance taxes. The point he made was that huge fortunes that persist are different than someone making a killing in some endeavor. They get involved in politics , get laws favoring them passed and act like a government behind the government. We have a shadow government looking out for their interests at the expense of the people. It is not hard to see how prophetic he was. And he was extremely wealthy.
A century later we have the populace frustrated by their inability to impact the laws that favor the wealthy and corporations. We feel like we are getting ripped off. That is because we are.
The top 400 wealthy have more wealth than the bottom 125 million. That is not what America was supposed to be. We have 2 Americas. But we were warned.
This not only leaves out capital gains tax (which falls disproportionately on people of higher income), but it also leaves out Social Security, Medicare, sales tax, state, and local taxes. Of these, SS, Medicare, and sales tax all fall disproportionately on lower incomes.
Looking at income tax to get a picture of which earners pay the highest proportion of tax or highest tax rate is misleading.
Whorish harlotry always exists, but a lot of women turning trashy tricks in a given time and place is usually a sign of social/economic distress. E.g., when the Irish fled the Potato Famine, many Irish women in America – separated from their families, in many cases by death – turned to the gash-for-cash trade to survive. When Italians emigrated to America in large numbers later in the century, there were comparatively few Italian women in the jizz biz – not because Italian women are any chaster than Irish, nor because cultural attitudes are any different, but because most Italians came over seeking opportunity rather than fleeing disaster, and they came over in intact families, and most women had the family support system to rely on and had no need to peddle the poontang.
Wouldn’t that cause their wealth to shrink? Assuming we still have capitalism, the rich require the middle and lower class to do the work and make them money. Any change to the environment that would shrink their wealth would in turn shrink their power. The more power hungry they are, they more they’ll do to increase their income/tax burden. Seems like a spiral upwards.
If Steve Jobs wants more power, he’ll have to make more money. It’s in his best interest to have a sufficiently rich middle class to buy what ever crap he puts out each spring. If he chooses to enslave the population he’ll have no income and hence now power.
The feed back loop I see is that the rich will require specifically targeted marketing to make themselves richer. Right now my guess is that Apple would come up with some sort of anti-abortion/pro-gun consumer electronic thus ensuring a continuous supply of revenue from conservative shoppers. Microsoft, seeing which way the wind blows, would come up with a pro-choice/pro-gun-control gaming console to capture the left leaning shoppers.
Meanwhile, if Joe the Shopper wants Abortion and gun control he’ll vote with his wallet.
Picture the commercials, “I’m a Mac, and that’s a child murdering PC that wants to take away your guns!”
Congrats, you’ve called out my thumbnail sketch as a thumbnail sketch.
Of course, the OP said
so that might have influenced what I chose to include in said sketch. 
That’s an interesting thought. Most modern plutocracies have typically happened in countries that a Fortune 500 CEO could practically buy outright, as I understand it–or at least, are based in areas where the wealth of the plutocrats is in natural resources rather than sales.
I’d expect a bit of conflict between the short-term planners (who’d put downward wage pressure on American workers and try to sell to the rest of the first world, to attempt to maintain markets while increasing their own relative power) and the long-term planners (who’d put parity or upward pressure on the American working (both blue- and white-collar) classes in order to curry political favor and stabilize the system for the long haul, given that a fat and happy populace doesn’t rebel like a starving and poor one).