Doesn't help when the government isn't maintaining or enforcing guardrails for the ultra wealthy.
This is a war on the middle class. Free and fair elections are the last hope that most have to resolve it peacefully, so of course those are under attack.
> I do not understand why anyone else would go along with this.
I've been asking myself that for 10 years. Through both traditional and social media manipulation, they found a way to get enough people to vote against their best interests, and normalize the behavior, that it doesn't matter if a large portion of the country is still paying attention and asking those questions.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixiecrat
but it was the GOP that actively sought to recruit them:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
The quotation was describing the creation of the very culture wars we're still living with today. And the evidence shows that this is still going on:
See also the apopleptic rage the rural right went into when Hillary Clinton made her "deplorables" remark. Even though she was clearly and explicitly talking about the white supremacists and racists infiltrating the Trump camp - something she was entirely correct about mind you - they chose to trauma bond with the white supremacists and rally around a billionaire pedophile rather than concede a point to a "liberal" in good faith.
eg the comments here: https://old.reddit.com/r/EconomyCharts/comments/1u8d9mq/olde...
The "if you contribute more, your vote should be worth more" sentiment would change a lot, because many actually rich people don't really pay a lot of taxes compared to higher middle class (engineers, doctors,..). If your vote was worth eg "log10(your-income-taxes + 1)" (to make buying a lot of votes impossible), more power would go to higher educated and higher paid people and less to people who don't contribute to society (at least not financially). Again, i'm talking about a society where pretty much everyone who works also pays income tax, and you're not cutting out the majority of poor people.
Would it work? Probably not, but i understand the sentiment.
Thus it feels like breaking that contract to have a substantial block of voters who will not only be recipients of increased benefits without ever having to pay more, but can run benefits programs into the ground and kill them without worry because they’ll die before that happens.
They don’t have any skin in the game. They stand to benefit, but never really lose.
I’ve not really worked that into a functional idea, though. The gist of my thought process is that you shouldn’t be able to vote on things where the delay on systemic issues occurring is beyond your life expectancy. So I could vote to change social security today, but probably not when I retire.
I have no idea how to quantify that delay in any reasonably objective way, though, and that’s where my idea falls apart.
It seems likely to become another political dog and pony show where the parties try to get arbitrary age cutoffs to get a demographic advantage. The idea that it would force parties to cater to younger voters more is interesting but I’m not sure a net positive. The impacts are too wide for me to gauge any kind of third order effects.
it has always been like this, has it not? almost by definition the more resources you have the more power you have. this is how the universe works.
Once upon a time only landowners were able to vote. Eventually that changed as the powerful realized that it was in their interest to share power, because they are vastly outnumbered and can have their riches taken away from them. It feels like we're getting closer and closer to today's rich classes having to learn that lesson again.
What does this mean? Trade means money has been transnational for thousands of years, at least since the Iron Age, or if you’re more expansive and include non-coined money, since the Bronze Age, with the globalized trading societies around the Mediterranean.
And that's just what I can do from my Etrade account. It's even more effortless if you have teams of accountants in various jurisdictions pushing paper around for you.
I'm intrigued. What is a paradigm to replace money?
Musk is predicting that in around 10 years' time money would no longer be relevant, but doesn't have a framing of what would make up for the things that money does. I think he misunderstands money.
A huge pile of gold isn’t inherently powerful, you need someone willing to accept gold to do what you want. They would also generally be intimately involved in doing the thing, so you paid premiums for dangerous or unpalatable work.
These days technology lets you turn resources into planes, tanks, drones, etc in a way where 100 soldiers with limitless resources probably beat 1000 with a constrained supply line pretty consistently.
You see the same with domestic conflict. Once upon a time, finding and tracking down revolutionaries was a tedious, labor-intensive process that usually resulted in failure. Now those resources can be converted into surveillance that is much more effective, and much less reliant on another human being willing to help.
Now, it's not a complete overlap between the government and the rich, and there are points where the two sides may disagree - some oligarchs have been imprisoned and killed before. But if you as an oligarch know how to say the right things and associate with the right people, you'll be allowed to do almost anything you want with impunity. It's an incredibly corrupt might-makes-right society where the hierarchies of political and economic power have already settled and aligned with one another. Most oligarchs don't get to dictate what happens in the government, but their arguments are basically the only ones that they even listen to.
Aspirations.
We should “listen” to these people with the same attitude as we do”listen” to gas station lottery addicts, instead we give them WAY too much credibility.
In democracy, power comes from demos. In capitalism, power comes from capital. Demos doesn't have concentrated capital.
Try starting a new party without capital and backing from people tied to mainstream media.
People never had power. Whenever they've thought they have power (revolutions), they fought for one new power hungry scumbag to replace old power hungry scumbag.
Because, as Plato argued, the best rulers are the ones that don’t want to rule, as ruling is a very heavy duty, if not burden.
If you strip corruption, it has no rewards. Instead you have to put up with “scambags” accusing for the things the corruption they would do if they had the power.
Why does this sound familiar?