I wonder how much behavior like this stems from weak regulation in the US to begin with. It seems like it would reinforce the rise of agents that assume they can ask for forgiveness after acting wantonly.
There are no organization or institutions or anything else that matters: only people matter. If people don't bother to have integrity then "institutions" (or anything based around them) are irrelevant.
"There are no institutions, only people." — https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1231219728619835395 (possibly quoting Papandreou)
In the US context:
> Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.
* https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-11-02-010...
This is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy. Low-trust societies are filled with weak, corrupted, lazy and stupid leaders.
I’d rather pay double for an honest mechanic. Asymmetric information requires a ton of resources to protect against, or you can just know the person you’re dealing with is honest.
The dishonest mechanic is incentivized to make you think they are honest. The honest mechanic appears honest. Knights and knaves problem.
The problem with government institutions in the USA isn’t MBAs. It’s that sources of corruption / bias were identified and counteracted with rules. And rules. And rules. And rules. And many of those rules appear to counter the common sense of the average person. So the average person believes the institutions don’t hold value. That and politics meant that lots of the laws that govern those institutions assume that no citizen is an honest mechanic and they all need to constantly prove to Vogons that they aren’t dishonest.
A great dive into the last park was done by Jen Pahlka in _Recoding America_.
The systems and concepts, like the Nolan Principles, are nothing more than words -- but if the majority agree to them, then the minority who violate them should be prevented from growing their influence.
In the US, it seems that despite having strong public institutions, the leadership of the country has reached a tipping point where those institutions are no longer valued.
The wide masses yes - the 1% who is looking to profit immensely from the upcoming chaos not.
DOGE is not about trimming government costs, it is about allowing the large companies to rip off the masses without repercussions (e.g. the planned demise of CFPB or OSHA/DoL) and it is about preparing the transfer of what used to be government-provided services at cost or subsidised to privatised for profit enterprises where the 1% profit (e.g. the dismantling of public schools).
The end game is obvious, neofeudalism: everything that the 99% do shall generate profit for the 1%. We shall own nothing and rent/pay for everything. It begins with five to six figures medical bills at birth and ends with our funeral costs.
2014 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchfor...
On top of that, mass media controls the narratives way too hard - just look how fast Luigi Mangione got out of the news.
What news would there be? He was arrested and locked up, his court case hasn’t started. Should we have “Luigi still in jail” headlines?
"Awareness" is almost never the limiting factor to policy change.
This is why awareness based movements such as occupy, BLM, and climate protests go nowhere. Everyone is aware of climate change, police brutality, or inequality.
Organized opposition with leverage and a compelling alternative is the bottleneck. Awareness isn't a policy position and doesn't advance debate.
Luigi did not have a thesis capable of changing minds. I dont know and haven't seen a single example of someone having their mind changed. Just people more fired up on their priors.
My point is that acting out until someone else comes up with a solution and someone else implements it almost never works. You have to change minds en masse.
No, it wasn't; if the momentum was there, the debate would have been self-sustaining and not dependent on new news events relating to Mangione to sustain it.
> but the day he got caught, the debate got suppressed and no one is talking about it anymore.
The debate didn't get suppressed and didn't need to be; the “debate” in the major media wasn't a real debate, it was just a way to stretch attention to Mangione news for a few more commercial breaks, and once there were no more news events for it to leverage for that purpose, it was abandoned by the same people who had been driving it. And, to the extent that there were people engaging in social media and elsewhere who saw the debate as genuine, they didn't need to be suppressed, as they never had momentum, they just mistook cynical commercial manipulation for opportunity.
It was all show no thought. The big questions remain unanswered. Where are costs inflated between pharmaceuticals, providers, hospital administrators, insurance administrators and patients seeking unnecessary care? How do we reform insurance when most people hate our healthcare system while simultaneously liking their own coverage?
Luigi didn't add anything substantive to the debate. Instead, his role was in facilitating venting. Someone still has to come up with an idea beyond "I hate this."
> there was a debate beginning to form what drives someone to execute a healthcare executive on the street
On Twitter, maybe. For most people, it was another Manhattan mental-health case murder. The chase and his good looks provided salacious intrigue, but only for so long as he was on the run.
Pharma costs are inflated by R&D costs and promotion. Insurance overhead is actually relatively lean, but base cost is primarily driven by cost of goods, and to a lesser extent admin. Provider costs are inflated by high legal and regulatory liability, shortage of qualified staff to offset liability, and high admin.
At a the highest level, cost is driven by an inability to discover and set prices at market clearing rates.
Manufacturer dont sell fixed price product into a market, but negotiate complex bulk deals with PBMs, pushing some prices up and others down. Similarly, hospitals/providers dont set prices at clearing rates, but negotiate 1:1 pricing, with some products above and below cost.
Last, and I suspect most significantly, health plans cant meaningfully vary in provided care, only cost sharing. That is to say, a bronze plan must include the same medications and procedures at a gold plan, differing only in copay. This breaks the price feedback on COGs. (e.g. a generic only insurance plan is illegal, so name brands face reduced competition).
If I were Medical Czar, I would look at banning preferential pricing/institutional rebates for goods and services.
I would allow more heterogeneity in policies (e.g. generics only, no implants, limited oncology, ect). This would crush innovation, but also greatly reduce pricing as it moves from cutting edge, to 10 year old technology.
Provider shortage is a tougher nut to crack, but I think it would require radically altering the residency program as it exists today and loosening requirements for other healthcare professionals.
If I had to pick one, I would say heterogeneity of insurance plans as most fundamental.
Consumers must have some exposure to cost savings or liability for downward price pressure exerted and inferior substitutes to be selected. People will never pick a $20 treatment over a $20,000 unless they have skin in the game, even if it is 99% as effective.
I think this has to be instituted at a insurance policy level for a number of reasons. Charges are stochastic and in the future, while policy premiums are predictable and immediate, allowing consumers to see cost or savings across the entire policy and pre-commit.
Measurability is tough on this because it amounts to allowing inferior treatment, and I dont think this could be papered over, even if it brings down the price of all care and allows more treatment in aggregate.
Uniform pricing is much better on the messaging. It is adjacent to collective bargaining, just mediated by a market instead of a technocrat. It can be sold to the left as an attack shadowy rentseekers. It can be sold on the right as a free market reform. On the pragmatic front, it can It has a transparent pricing angle, where you could see prices, which current transparency legislation seems to fail. I also think there is a lot of negative will pent up about negotiated pricing and the idea of companies paying drastically lower prices than an individual because they can throw their weight around when bargaining.
"Remove the people between you and your doctor."
In all socialized systems the government decides what your doctor can do, 100% of the time. Of course from a patient perspective it looks much less restrictive, but that's only because your doctor never brings up treatments that aren't paid for.
One of the big issues with the US system is that the patient is put right in the middle of the decisions so sees all the rejections, has to deal with all the paperwork, and pays the price when things go wrong.
This is the admittedly huge emotional problem, but distinct from cost problem. Hospitals and insurance billing systems can be as dysfunctional as they want because all of the financial liability is outsourced to the patient.
If this outsourcing were not possible, insurance and hospitals would have worked the issue out long ago. I expect all treatment would be pre-approved by default, and hospitals would carry the cost of misbilling (like how a retail store eats a fee for credit card purchases)
Patients need to be more involved.
There is universal healthcare through compulsory national health insurance (premiums subsidized if needed).
However, the insurance only covers a portion. About 10-20% will come from a forced medical savings account.
Then there is the cash part of the cost.
The government has designed the entire system to make sure no patients pay $0 of their own money. Even indignant patients will work with a social worker to figure out what they can pay. If it's only $2, then they are billed $2.
It's a pretty good system in terms of keeping costs down, keeping patients involved in the cost of their care, yet ensuring nobody goes without critical healthcare.
The issue with the US is that it's kinda set up for patients to be at the center, but misses critical components (like price transparency) to the point that even though patients are required to manage their own healthcare financiing, they aren't actually given the tools to do it efficiently.
Republicans might make big changes but this has been the situation since Obama.
People say this a lot, but it seems just as likely to me that the media is simply reflecting what we care about. Coverage fades because, broadly speaking, people have moved on from the story. Even more "intellectual media" like the Atlantic has moved on from it. I get that it’s uncomfortable to acknowledge, but an equally plausible explanation is that the public is far more interested in Blake Lively’s lawsuit than in Mangione or the state of healthcare in the U.S.
Yes, it’s a symbiotic relationship, but I think people are often too eager to blame a shadowy cabal rather than recognizing that it’s often just a reflection of what society actually values. Probably because, as stated, dismantling mass media seems like something that could possibly happen while changing the entirety of a nation is essentially impossible.
The history of modern revolutions is that the rich are fine. Hell, even in the French Revolution, most of the aristocracy fled with their lives and moveable riches. In the intervening centuries, mobility of both people and wealth has substantially increased.
Middle manager from Minnesota scraping in at the very bottom of the 0.1% wealth line, in a system with power-law dynamics, is a high-profile mugging.
"for are we not generous gods?" --Most Billionaires
Which is, of course, just as stupid as the 2020 MAGA conspiracies. His money sure as shit bought the election, but it wasn't by fucking with the votes.
Assuming any evidence exists, why did none of the people who could actually gather any file injuctions, lawsuits, etc? They had four months to do it, three of them while the incumbent still controlled the executive.
Gerrymandering is legal, if done by the books, which is the entire point of doing it. And the voter suppression caused by apathy due to FPTP (in the US and UK) or minimum-vote thresholds like the 5% rule here in Germany is built into the system, so even harder to legally challenge even though Germany may lose up to 20% of all cast votes in next week's election in the worst case because they are summarily dismissed this time.
[@]https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trumps-doj-volun...
Just remember that not all conspiracy theories are wrong, but there being so many popular ones from the left now is not a good sign regardless if they are right or wrong.
So everything I said was right, the people who responded to me validated it, they think there are conspiracies! That means there are a lot of conspiracy theories, I explicitly noted that I didn't say they were right or wrong.
All anyone can do is guess and imagine, because of this.
Everyone has to be a theory. Reason is extinct.
The effect of network organizations like Heritage Foundation or the decades-long work of the Koch brothers or the Murdoch clan on what Trump is doing is not to be underestimated.
That said, it's also an empathogen that promotes prosocial behavior, which isn't the word I'd use to describe the behavior happening.
You can barely tell a poor person to change their life, imagine the discussion with a multi billionaire. There's no discussion.
https://x.com/Dreamshockcom/status/1881383073495048599
Some might say he was just stretching his neck, but personally I love an electronic music gigs, and I've seen that behaviour enough times before. He's not quiet about his ketamine usage either (not an upper per-se, but close to an alcohol-like hallucinogenic from my experience).
I don't know about that, but certainly it has exposed a significant weakness in the US democratic structure: it is based on the supposition that everyone will follow the rules (i.e., accepting the results of an election, following the laws passed by congress, etc.) A president who defies both conventions and laws is hard to stop. The only mechanism is impeachment, and that as we have seen is _extremely difficult_ to do -- in many cases that has been used frivolously by both parties, but even in the case where it should have been a slam dunk -- Trump's attempted coup -- the most GOP senators were too afraid of their own re-election chances because of Trump's ability to "rile up the masses" (look at Liz Cheney). A climate of fear is an essential part of authoritarianism because it paralyzes those who might be able to take action to ensure that the democratic principles are upheld.
When you have an angry mob attack the capitol building and threaten to kill politicians, and they are pardoned by the person who incited them, that generates a lot of fear.
I wonder how much is this is "rational" due to Congress being broken as an institution. Hyper-partisanship and an unchecked filibuster means that Congress is stuck in permanent gridlock. The only way to get anything done is through executive power. But the system wasn't designed to work that way and so the checks on executive power can seem stifling to progress. It seems that many are willing to look the other way if they feel like its the only way to get what they want done. Concern only seems to come into play when its the other side wielding power. And this seems to be true across the aisle. Many on the left were frustrated with Biden's perceived timidity when it came to exercising executive power. And I feel like he was pressured into doing things that he wasn't fully comfortable doing unilaterally (especially regarding student loan forgiveness). Of course, the difference is that Biden spent 40 years in the Senate, understands the role of Congress in government, and had no intention of "ignoring the rules". Trump isn't limited by that type of thinking since he had no experience with, no great knowledge of, or respect for American government.
Or when a large enough percentage is easy to fool and manipulate, too many dumb and uneducated. Lots of failure modes
…And here we are
All the while pointificating about morals and values.
This isn't true at all.
The main way the President is stopped is through the courts, which is already underway, but Trump has actually prevailed in several decisions (e.g. right to cancel government contracts, right to fire probationary employees) while blocked other (e.g. birthright citizenship).
But it's not one court decision since it can be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court (which Trump intends to do on several issues).
Impeachment is a very high bar which is usually reserved for serious violations of the law or process. We aren't anywhere close to that.
It is absolutely true. The judiciary has no mechanism to _enforce_ laws. Enforcement belongs to the executive branch. Therefore, if the judiciary makes a decision, and the president chooses to not follow the court's order, there is little the courts can do. It can certainly threaten fines and contempt of court to executive officials and even the president, but the president has control over both the DOJ/law enforcement to carry out the ruling as well as having blanket pardon powers.
> Impeachment is a very high bar which is usually reserved for serious violations of the law or process. We aren't anywhere close to that.
The current sitting president lead an insurrection against the United States and was not convicted in Congress. We've already crossed the threshold and gone well past the point of Congress acting to hold the executive branch accountable. Now given Musk's threats of financially backing primary candidates against dissenters, there is no incentive to act.
A few issues with that statement.
First, law enforcement can defy the President in order to follow the law or court orders (which they are required to do).
Second, enforcement isn't always through law enforcement. If the courts decide that an agency can do X, then they can go ahead and do X. No FBI involvement needed. Same if the issue ends up being something the state execute on.
> The current sitting president lead an insurrection against the United States and was not convicted in Congress.
That's because he was never charged. Why was he never charged? It's kind of hard to claim insurrection when nobody was armed and didn't actually have the ability to commit insurrection.
A person trying to break down a door was shot and killed and that ended things pretty quickly.
If you’re actually defending the events of Jan 6 as not an insurrection then you are part of the problem and we have nothing more to debate.
You're getting mixed up.
SCOTUS didn't rule on that until years after Jan 6th. And the SCOTUS ruling doesn't cover crimes committed outside the scope of the President, which an insurrection would most certainly fall under.
And "by the time he became president"? You mean "four years later". You're saying the insurrection case was so solid they couldn't bring him to trial within 4 years?
No.
The truth is that the prosecution knew they didn't have evidence to support convicting Trump of insurrection. As for impeachment, they tried and failed.
Any law enforcement officer defying the president or attempting to enforce a court order against the executive branch can and will be removed by the president. You say "which they are required to do" but again, the executive branch is the enforcement mechanism when they don't which is at the discretion of the president.
> Second, enforcement isn't always through law enforcement. If the courts decide that an agency can do X, then they can go ahead and do X. No FBI involvement needed. Same if the issue ends up being something the state execute on.
I have no idea what this means. The courts can certainly decide whether or not the executive branch has broken the law. But again, there is no enforcement mechanism in the judiciary branch.
> That's because he was never charged. Why was he never charged? It's kind of hard to claim insurrection when nobody was armed and didn't actually have the ability to commit insurrection.
He was impeached, for a second time, in the House for "incitement of an insurrection" and acquitted in the Senate. Are you conveniently forgetting this?
Impeachment by the house isn’t a high bar since Clinton; the senate is much harder.
The fact that the richest man in the world, acting with at least a visual approval of the next 10-100 richest people in the world has only managed some minor chaos is a testament to how insulated from economic power the US government was (in the grand scheme of things).
Real issues will emerge if such concentration of power is made perpetual.
I think a good part of the world still doesn't get it. Progress is mostly a outcome of stability, not change, even less rapid change.
This whole concept might sound counter intuitive. But think about it seriously. Exponential growth, when you factor in small losses in between comes when you stick to one process(that generates small gains) for long. Not by making rapid changes to a process(in hopes of making one big gain) for a long time.
If you're not horrified by the access musk has had so far to the Treasury Department, remember how info is sold on the internet.
And last, but not least, Project 2025. Personal morality cannot be legislated. We want the government out of our backyard, bedroom and bank account, P 2025 wants a part of all, the question is will the American voter willingly be led down the path of limited autonomy. (my generation, boomer, used to be all about personal freedom, now we seem to believe in freedom only for ourselves, that is, if we are white and male.)
It's exposing the intellectual bankruptcy of the Silicon Valley elite. Between the stupidity and kowtowing it has revealed a startling amount of groupthink and cowardice, even among people I once held as independent thinkers.
Yarvin's claim: "[In] F.D.R.’s first inaugural address,... he essentially says, Hey, Congress, give me absolute power, or I’ll take it anyway"
From FDR's speech: "I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis--broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency..."
Operative phrase: "I shall ask the Congress"
These people are, at best, dishonest and cowardly. Even more disappointing, it's increasingly clear the only indicator of actual intelligence is net worth. This is rather lossy signal, unfortunately.
Interview: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-in...
Oh, and before someone comes and brings up the court packing proposal, it didn’t have to happen, and FDR’s main claim to making the proposal was that he had a mandate based on his, iirc, at the time 3rd supermajority sweep of the electoral college, unlike, say our current President who claims a mandate while not even winning 50% of the popular vote and fell way short of even 400 electoral college votes.
Court packing would have required the coördination of the Congress and the President to essentially remake the Supreme Court. It's distinctly different from Musk turning off funding to legally-mandated programmes.
You are talking about the guy who sent American citizens of Japanese descent to interment/forced labor camps and got hundreds of thousands of Americans killed in WW2, a war we should have never joined. He committed much more evil than anything Trump has done and will ever do.
2) I truly don’t understand the “none of your business?” Whose behavior am I obsessing over? Only candidates I can think of are POTUS and his inner circle which… is absolutely my business…?
Also: It's a literal interview lol. You get to read his own answers to (very light) skeptical questioning.
You can see him completely elide (or forget, or not know?) that CEOs are accountable to boards and, ultimately, to shareholders. You get to see him dismiss his own child's fears about Trump's wall by first forgetting (or deceiving, again) that Trump did indeed start building a physical, literal wall, then assure his child that his life won't change as he attends a fancy private Mandarin immersion school in San Francisco.
The hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty just cannot help but seep out of this supposedly serious thinker!
Of course the real value of his philosophy is its conclusion that the ultrawealthy should rule the world. So the ahistoricism, dishonesty, and internal incoherence hardly matter to the Silicon Valley elite.
In a parliamentary system, if the Prime Minister wants to merge/abolish/restructure government agencies, it normally just happens - because, most of the time, the Prime Minister can be confident the legislature will vote for any necessary legislation, since the PM’s party/coalition will control the legislature. So, the whole argument that Trump is illegally shutting down government agencies, why would a PM shut something down illegally when they can do it legally? The only exception might be in a minority government scenario, when the PM might not have the votes to get the necessary legislation passed - but, in such a scenario, if they decide to bypass the legislature and shut it down anyway, the legislature likely wouldn’t let them
Similarly, this whole “impoundment” thing - in most parliamentary systems, the executive is under no obligation to spend appropriated funds, and if they decide not to, the legislative majority will not have any problem with it - because, the executive and the legislative majority are basically the same thing. It is only because in the US (and maybe other countries with presidential systems, such as much of Latin America), the legislature gets upset by the executive deciding not to spend appropriated funds, and tries to make it illegal for them to do so. (Although we’ll see what the Supreme Court has to say-don’t be surprised if the current conservative SCOTUS majority decides that the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 is at least partially unconstitutional, or else renders it judicially unenforceable, e.g. using the political question doctrine.)
Many political scientists argue that the presidential system is inferior to the parliamentary, and produces political instability, gridlock, strongman (caudillo) rule. For a long time, while much of Latin America suffered from many of those problems, the US escaped them - whether due to wealth, cultural protective factors, or just plain good luck. However, with the return of caudillo Trump (arguably in his second term acting even more like a caudillo than in his first) and now the “DOGE scenario”, maybe the US’s luck has finally run out, and its politics are at last turning Latin American.
So, it's really hard to point out that we want to revert to the status quo because the winner of the last election was apathy in first place.
It's hard to take these apocalyptic premonitions about federal government reduction seriously.
See for instance: https://www.investopedia.com/gilded-age-7692919
Musk and his ilk are interested in looting the treasury. It has nothing to do with government efficiency.
It's not like comparing apples with oranges, it's literally comparing a bacteria with country.
You're also forgetting the tremendous amount of social unrest during that time because of that inequality (and as a result, the workers rights we enjoy today which largely arose from that period, and the Great Depression, though there have been great efforts to erode them).
I mean, there was technological and medical improvements, sure, and continued urbanization.
But that’s… those are some of our nations most shameful, inequal, racist years in its entire history. The federal government as it exists now was just getting started after we realized we needed it thanks to the civil war, and many local democratic systems were completely broken. More relevantly, we didn’t have cancer researchers, epidemiologists, the NSF, or, most relevantly, nuclear weapons.
Finally, a HUGE majority of the costs of the federal government are social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense spending. I doubt even the biggest libertarian on here could advocate cutting any those with a straight face, unless they’re young and don’t know anyone older than them, and/or advocates isolationism.
Regardless, this exact story makes it clear that the goal isn’t cutting the size of the government at all — it’s politicizing the civil service, and bringing it under the exclusive control of a supreme executive. They’re not exactly ashamed of it!
As President Musk said, “that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity”
And, sadly, I won't take "Trump won the election and then put Elon in charge of cutting stuff, so clearly Americans support that decision" as evidence instead of direct, scientific surveys. For one thing, much less than half of the voting public voted affirmatively for Trump; for another, I hope we can all agree that people on all sides very often vote for reasons very loosely related to the candidate's actual positions on policy.
Apologies if I'm rude, really grateful that such convos are happening on HN in the first place! Separate from "would we be better off with or without the New Deal welfare state and/or the entire federal government", I think this is an appropriate place to agree on empirical facts about the current situation. And "that idea is extremely unpopular" is such a fact, IMHO.
See: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v81n4/v81n4p1.html
They’ve been fed a lie that the system is failed and believe it.
This isn’t my opinion. I’m a widow and survivors benefits for my children has significantly eased the burden of taking care of them. I’m strongly in favor of expanding these programs and soaking the rich to pay for them. Instead they’re getting their money, and someday find themselves on the wall.
I think plenty of people would like to cut Medicare and Medicaid spending, not by reducing service, but by cleaning up the unbelievably broken medical system in the US.
Who says I don't advocate cutting those too, if you're asking? And I am grey haired, not sure about the ageism.
Majority is just a collection of tiny minorities, in this case my minority opinion partially aligns. As it turns out minority isn't aways what you think.
https://napolitannews.org/posts/19-percent-of-voters-know-wh...
(PDF) https://napolitannews.org/assets/pdfs/67633dc0cced7-gcm24-12...
I was attempting to find evidence for your claim, and I found that survey. If you can find other surveys, please share, as I am seeing this being repeated a lot.
Are you suggesting their creation was improper? Or suggesting constituency advocation would make it proper?
Either way you might draw uncomfortable conclusions.
They moved the goalposts to what fraction of voters were questionably polled to know about DOGE, because my claim is pretty much irrefutable. Then when I use their own criteria suddenly we cry foul that I used their own goal posts that they shifted to.
The poor can gain something at least temporarily by taking it from the rich. Another less violent option is mutually beneficial voluntary interactions.
The government told a bunch of rich people that the incredibly valuable people they owned were no longer their property, and gave money and land to the people who previously had nothing because they hadn't been considered people. That's what kicked off your Gilded Age
Emancipation isn't Marxist, historically or conceptually.
> That's what kicked off your Gilded Age
Absolutely not. "Railroads were the major growth industry," with industrialisation and immigration being the era's economic drivers [1]. "The South remained economically devastated after the American Civil War" and remained a drag on the American economy throughout most of the Gilded Age.
Nothing about that era resembles Marxism, and I’d guess you’d struggle to tell the difference between Karl Marx and the Marx Brothers.
Reconstruction was shut down. Slaves went from assets to contract services. Jim Crow ensured that there was no movement upward. For the aristocracy, they were hurt by the depredation of war but recovered stronger than before under the new system.
The gilded age was about railroads. The south with their feudalist system was a backwater producing mostly raw material. They moved out of irrelevance because social control allowed them to control the Senate for decades.
If you're ignoring that huge economic event in your analysis of the economics of the latter half of the 19th century, trying to replicate it today is going to be very rough.
Given your other replies in this thread, you're not interested in arguing honestly and I'm not going to continue engaging.
It also had nothing to do with Marxism. There was no redistribution of land as in social revolutions in other countries (France, Russia, China).