America Has a Ruling Class
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If they can have the cake and eat it too, why wouldn't they? The voters seem to eat it up every time and give them no reason to stop the act.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/joseph-epstein/j...
It has been the great triumph of the effort to eliminate the middle class that an overwhelming majority of the underclass do not know they are; and firmly believe they are, as their grandparents were, middle-class. A mark of that success is that instead of resenting having been driven out of the middle class, people resent learning that they are not in it.
If you have wealthy and powerful parents with wealthy and powerful friends, you'll likely end up being wealthy and powerful yourself even if you totally screw up your life choices. You probably still end up going to an elite college, hanging around in elite business clubs meeting other people in the same position as you.
No amount of hussle is going to turn someone with no familial wealth or connections into a Clinton, Kennedy or Bush. Just as no amount of staying late and working hard is going to turn a factory worker into a Bezos, Musk or Gates. The "family and friends" round of investment isn't going to yield much if neither your friends nor family have any wealth to spare.
US economic output has remained on the same sharp rising slope since 1975 as between 1945 and 1975. But since 1975, all of that increased income has been diverted to the ruling class, while the rest of the nation has been stuck at 1975 levels.
If $300,000/y seems to you like upper-class income, it is purely because you have been made accustomed to a 1975 level of prosperity, while the ruling class lives on 2021 income it has since 1975 diverted to its own pockets.
The ruling class will not give up its diversion of income from your pockets to their pockets without a fight. Imagine how angry they would be at being made to give that up; you should, by rights, be more angry at their ongoing confiscation of your income.
"Are you saying cyan is blue? It is obviously green!"
What has led "most people" to conclude as they do is the actual topic under discussion. Thus you demonstrate begging the question.
Of course it's a gradient rather than a clear dividing line, but there are people who make 100x, 1,000x, 10,000x or more of what the lowest of the low are making and there's no gradual progression from the latter to the former. There are massive gaps that are impossible to bridge.
If you consider that the average person's economic situation worsened throughout 2020 while all the top billionaires drastically increased their wealth (if not proportionately, then at least in absolute numbers), this only widens that gap.
I agree that putting a single dividing line at $299k or whatever is silly, but yes, even a person making $299k is economically insignificant to a triple digit billionaire (or just any billionaire, to be honest). The divide isn't between people making $299k and people making $300k, the divide is between billionaires and people making subsistence level or less -- everyone else just falls on the gradient in between.
In the UK class still refers more to traditional social standing (i.e. someone from a bloodline of aristocrats would be considered "upper class" even if they have a measly income and no generational wealth or political status) but in the US this has almost entirely eroded to refer to how much money you make (with even distinctions between "new money" and "old money" evaporating over time). Most countries lie somewhere in between.
Marxists often try to be similarly reductive by saying ownership of "the means of production" is the only class distinction. But even Karl Marx wouldn't have agreed with this strictly binary approach.
If you spend even a few seconds studying the biographies of the top billionaires, it should be obvious that even a small-scale business owner has less in common with them than with the working poor. If there is a single dividing line, I would say it is if money means being able to purchase goods and services, or if it means being able to exert political power.
A billionaire not only has at least a thousand times as much money as someone with a thousand dollars to their name. This level of wealth compounds. Merely having this amount of money readily available not only affords them easy access to credit (and thus additional liquidity) but it also affects other people's (and companies') behavior towards them. Poor people on the other hand have to resort to collective bargaining (e.g. labor/trade unions).
The ones that always say their opinions are not a matter of politics.
The ones that claim "reality has a liberal bias."
When faced with divergent opinions or norms, goes straight to "misinformed" or "uneducated" for a label.
Generally speaking, they're nauseating, moralistic hypocrites.