Hacker News Reader

Comment by sghiassy | Hacker News Reader

It’s the second gilded age

Hopefully this one will pass, just as the first did

My paranoid brain thinks the new "Every baby gets a $1000 investment account" is a lame effort on their part to keep it going. For an extremely low price tag they can give every child & parent skin in the game. For someone struggling seeing their kids account go up a $100 might compel them to support the bloated financial/banking industry now that they get a few drops from it.

The Gilded Age didn’t just “pass”. It was ended by strong unions and antitrust legislation (and enforcement). Passivity will kill us if we let the oligarchs have their way. Hope is not a plan. Appeasement will have no more success than it did in WWII.

The long arm of history bends towards progress. Not because progress happens spontaneously, but because people bend it

The default oligarch orientation is to treat workers as slaves to the maximum possible extent.

Firefights with guns, hand-to-hand violence, and real deaths were needed to give unions the leverage they had.

For some reason this history isn't taught in schools.

Maybe not yours but it was taught at my mediocre public school. We definitely covered Fort Frick, the Pinkertons, the Haymarket bombing, formation of the IWW and AFL-CIO, etc. For some reason people just tend to not pay attention or remember anything from their high school history classes.

The first one passed with a lot of regular people losing their homes, their jobs, and even their lives. I wish just for once we could have the wealthy elites get their comeuppance without it also screwing over everyone else.

there were substantial crashes and booms during the gilded age as well, it wasn't uncommon to go bust and lose a house before the great depression. The panic of `73 is pretty comparable with the great depression, for example

All things pass. The question is what the fallout will look like for everyone who doesn't have their hand in the cookie jar.

I'm more interested in what happens to those with their hands in. They need to lose those hands.

“Thieves of private property pass their lives in chains. Thieves of public property, in riches and luxury”. —Cato the Elder

Reply on news.ycombinator.com