Why Petulant Oligarchs Rule Our World | Hacker News Reader

Why Petulant Oligarchs Rule Our World

nytimes.com

6 pointsSirLJ14 comments

Because we don't have a global minimum wealth tax.

Countries have shown that they can work together to implement a global minimum corporation tax[0] to prevent the race-to-the-bottom / tragedy-of-the-commons dynamics of corporations playing countries off against each other, so why can't countries now do the same for taxes on the wealth of ultra-millionaires?

I would base it on Elizabeth Warren's plan[1] for a national wealth tax in the US, which would only apply to the top 0.1% of households there.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_minimum_corporate_tax_r...

[1] https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/ultra-millionaire-tax

Petulant oligarchs exist because inequity and wealth transference to the top is baked into the US monetary system. Until the monetary system undergoes a radical transformation, the oligarchy will only get worse.

You seem to be very here-and-now focused. "The US", for instance. Whose monetary system is better? And why? Or are they all rotten, and you're just focused on the US because that's where you live?

And, it wasn't always this way (I mean, it wasn't always possible to argue that it was based on the monetary system). The petulant oligarchs ruled the world because they had armies, and the rest of us were serfs. That had nothing to do with the monetary system.

I think the "petulant oligarchs" problem is much more widespread than your post indicates. No matter what the system, people find ways to work it to put themselves in positions of power and money. If you fix the US monetary system (whatever you think "fix" looks like), we might get a different set of oligarchs, playing by a different set of rules, but we'll still have them. They'll almost certainly still be petulant, too.

Krugman's essay is about the US.

There's never been a particularly equitable money system in modern times, the last 200 years or so. In the US, the gold standard was replaced by the fractional reserve system. I'm not opposed to fractional reserve on its face but since the US system is mostly owned and run by private interests, it's opened a wider door for the more truculent and petulant oligarchs to excel at rising to the top of the food chain.

I'm no fan of the gold standard either. It seems that whatever a money system is based on, people will move heaven and Earth to acquire that thing. Under the gold standard, entire nations were wiped out in order for "explorers" to acquire gold. In our debt based fractional reserve system, people will ruin themselves to acquire debt.

A monetary system based on a gram of protein might see a world with a surplus of food but I'm merely speculating.

While it is fair to say the US economic system enables outsize wealth accumulation at the same time wages have stagnated for decades, what's that got to do with the monetary system? People who blame everything on modern central banking are usually barking up the wrong tree, sometimes in ways that originate in conspiracy theories.

There is enough wrong with the system without inventing villains.

The Federal Reserve was hatched at a secret meeting, according to the Federal Reserve. IOW, the Fed itself was the result of conspiring by private and public interests.

"On Nov. 24, 1910, a select group of men enjoyed a Thanksgiving dinner of wild turkey with oyster stuffing at the luxurious Jekyll Island Club, off the coast of Georgia. The resort offered a host of leisurely pursuits, but the men weren't there to golf or ride horses. Instead, the group was there to devise a plan to remake the nation's banking system. The meeting was a closely guarded secret and would not become widely known until the 1930s. But the plan developed on Jekyll Island laid the foundation for what would eventually be the Federal Reserve System."

https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...

Ironic source. They're upset because their petulant oligarchs don't rule entirely unopposed.

Exactly. They are constantly defending their petulant oligarchs as if they have some moral high ground.

OTOH, it is, I think, a valid point that "our" petulant oligarchs are neither petulant aristos nor petulant mobs. (petulant monarchs being right out, and are there even any potential petulant timocrats?)

cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacyclosis

[M Licinius] Crassus Rules Everything Around Me

I didn’t know HNers read Yarvin

Sorry, that was yoinked from Plato. cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572

Is Yarvin better than de Maistre (or at least Ezra Pound)? (the best argument for monarchy I've seen so far is a claim that there were so many glass ceilings when Britannia was Ruling the Waves that the Peter Principle never had a chance to get into play)

On the Realpolitik front, the Athenians make a compelling argument for petulant dynarchs in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Melos#The_Melian_Dial...

> "δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν."

Yarvin’s take on monarchy is within the context of a post modernist world so it’s probably more relevant

The Athenian argument is interesting. Seems they were right, as the loss to Sicily led to more rebellion

Having just read A formalist manifesto and Technology, communism and the Brown Scare I can see some points where Yarvin and I start from similar observations and cultural baggage, yet wind up in different locations.

A formalist manifesto — (a) the danger of picking a single axis of merit is that you'll wind up deciding the ideal daily intake is 2000 calories worth of squeeze margarine (b) yes, Violence is a big problem in the Old Country, but should Yarvin move elsewhere, he may discover that many elsewheres simultaneously have as much or more democracy while suffering from much less violence.

Technology, communism and the Brown Scare — I agree that the Old Country is a workers' paradise, but as far as I'm concerned, that's a side effect of monomaniacal attention to income while ignoring that of which it is a first derivative, namely wealth. And since I'm willing to be contrarian on the former Union (despite having part of my Tradition descended via White Emigration), I find it surprising that Yarvin's figure of merit presumably classifies bolshies and Stalin as "good" communists, while mensheviks and Gorby would be classified as "bad".

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Finally, "The whole [Western government] thing will be lucky if it lasts another ten years" (The Case Against Democracy; 2007), from the standpoint of 15 years later, has not exactly aged well.

I am reminded of: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pa...

> In the geniuses Lenin and Trotzky, the Bolshevik movement found its leadership. Lenin had no use for democracy as it was known in America. To him it was a sham, a front for the great capitalist trusts, which—even though the capitalists themselves might not know it—were doomed to get bigger on a shrinking market, until international capitalist war, bankruptcy, and working-class revolution was the result. Lenin was as sure that this would happen as he was that the sun would rise the next morning. The only dispute was the matter of timing; a few Bolshevik pessimists thought that the capitalist world might last into the 1920's.

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