When too few have too much, it creates oppression, tyranny, it destroys democracy, it creates economic slavery, it reduces growth and innovation, it weakens the wealth of the public so they can buy fewer goods and increases the percent of people who need to find employment by serving the wealthy, it lowers wages and political rights, and much more.
Many people simply don't have any idea about this issue, and have simplistic notions, such as 'private wealth good, government and taxes bad'.That's as sophisticated as they get. And that view is heavily promoted to them by the wealthy interests.
When any challenge to unlimited concentration of wealth is brought up all they can understand is communism and Mao and Stalin and Castro, and say 'nope'.
All 'handouts' are viewed as waste and wrong except in cases like a paralyzed person. They assume that if the 'handouts' aren't there, the people will become middle class workers or at least make a decent living.
They simply do not understand at all how the economy works and the issues with the few being able to direct so much income to themselves. They don't understand what plutocracy is, why it's bad, or that it's being fought for hard, and happening. To them, the word plutocracy is like Karl Marx ranting about capitalists, nutty left-wing stuff.
A problem with their ignorance is that they simply can't view any need for taxing the rich to balance society and counter the rich receiving so large a share of the income. In their ignorance they can only think that is 'theft' and 'greed' to take other people's money.
Here's an example of what that mentality leads to. In come countries half a century ago, the main industry would be agriculture, like a fruit. An American company would buy practically all the farmable land, pushing families off. It would hire the workers it needed at low wages, expendable and easily replaced, and leave the rest to starve.
Even land it didn't use, it would own and keep idle and prevent the hungry people from farming, because it didn't want any risk of competition.
It would use its wealth to install a government that worked for it, and pay Washington to protect it. it would have its military and police serving the interests of the company, not the people.
If workers tried to grow on that land, they'd be arrested. If they resisted violently or with sabotage, they'd be called terrorists and killed. If there were elections and someone who served the people more were elected, they might be overthrown, possibly by the US, such as the leader of Guatemala was when he tried to have some land reform.
Little did he know, I wonder, that the arrangement for all the land in his country to be owned by a US company had been arranged by the US Secretary of State and his brother, the head of the CIA, and that they and many other senior officials had financial stakes in the company.
It was in this environment that John Kennedy said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."
Yes, what was needed was the government to step in, and implement land reform - to take unused land and let the people live and farm on it. Not to simply look only at the wealth of the company and say they could have it all regardless of the impact on the people.
But today, so many Americans have no idea about the problem of too much concentration of wealth, of why the government has a needed role in representing the interests of the public against the wealthy, the need for a balance in the distribution in wealth.
That balance can be improved by a number of measures, including taxation and labor rights and public investment in things like education, and simply in strong democracy so that government represents voters instead of rich donors.
For much of American history, there was no question about these issues. Even if the powers didn't follow them they at least paid them lip service - look how 'collectivist' and 'socialist' our core democratic slogans have been - 'of the people, by the people, for the people', 'e pluribus unum' (from the many, one), 'with liberty and justice for all', etc.
At times, the people have acted on these principles - the progressive movement of the early 20th century against the gilded age, the election of a Democratic super-majority in response to the Great Depression that radically changed our government (for the better), etc.
But why has America lost its mind on the basic idea that too much for too few is a problem? Because there has been a massive propaganda campaign to sell the public on the libertarian and plutocratic ideology, with 'think tanks' and mass media bombarding the messages 24x7, until now it's the accepted 'normal' politics. The Republican Party has been taken over and some Democrats.
Who cares if 90% of the media is owned by a handful of corporations? The public just knows they like their big corporation products, their big corporation entertainment, and don't like politics.
The Republicans just cut $1 trillion from Medicaid, in order to reduce taxes on the rich. Why? Because they opposed Democrats' Medicaid expansion to everyone by challenging it in court; and when they won a partial victory to let states decide whether to expand Medicaid, most Republican states decided not to - so cutting the $1 trillion comes almost entirely from Democratic states.
Pure partisan politics at the expense of millions of people's healthcare who can least afford it. Many Americans will be killed by that action alone.
How many times can taxes on the rich be lowered and allowed by cutting spending on the public and adding to the debt and raising taxes on the public? What will it take for the American people to realize the policies will bring plutocracy?
People need to learn the simple idea that too much inequality is a disaster and needs to be counteracted by the people and the government, and that it's neither wrong nor theft to do so.
Or, they can learn to be serfs again, as mankind has usually been before the liberal American politics created a middle class like never before. At some point, even lip service won't be needed.
Many people simply don't have any idea about this issue, and have simplistic notions, such as 'private wealth good, government and taxes bad'.That's as sophisticated as they get. And that view is heavily promoted to them by the wealthy interests.
When any challenge to unlimited concentration of wealth is brought up all they can understand is communism and Mao and Stalin and Castro, and say 'nope'.
All 'handouts' are viewed as waste and wrong except in cases like a paralyzed person. They assume that if the 'handouts' aren't there, the people will become middle class workers or at least make a decent living.
They simply do not understand at all how the economy works and the issues with the few being able to direct so much income to themselves. They don't understand what plutocracy is, why it's bad, or that it's being fought for hard, and happening. To them, the word plutocracy is like Karl Marx ranting about capitalists, nutty left-wing stuff.
A problem with their ignorance is that they simply can't view any need for taxing the rich to balance society and counter the rich receiving so large a share of the income. In their ignorance they can only think that is 'theft' and 'greed' to take other people's money.
Here's an example of what that mentality leads to. In come countries half a century ago, the main industry would be agriculture, like a fruit. An American company would buy practically all the farmable land, pushing families off. It would hire the workers it needed at low wages, expendable and easily replaced, and leave the rest to starve.
Even land it didn't use, it would own and keep idle and prevent the hungry people from farming, because it didn't want any risk of competition.
It would use its wealth to install a government that worked for it, and pay Washington to protect it. it would have its military and police serving the interests of the company, not the people.
If workers tried to grow on that land, they'd be arrested. If they resisted violently or with sabotage, they'd be called terrorists and killed. If there were elections and someone who served the people more were elected, they might be overthrown, possibly by the US, such as the leader of Guatemala was when he tried to have some land reform.
Little did he know, I wonder, that the arrangement for all the land in his country to be owned by a US company had been arranged by the US Secretary of State and his brother, the head of the CIA, and that they and many other senior officials had financial stakes in the company.
It was in this environment that John Kennedy said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."
Yes, what was needed was the government to step in, and implement land reform - to take unused land and let the people live and farm on it. Not to simply look only at the wealth of the company and say they could have it all regardless of the impact on the people.
But today, so many Americans have no idea about the problem of too much concentration of wealth, of why the government has a needed role in representing the interests of the public against the wealthy, the need for a balance in the distribution in wealth.
That balance can be improved by a number of measures, including taxation and labor rights and public investment in things like education, and simply in strong democracy so that government represents voters instead of rich donors.
For much of American history, there was no question about these issues. Even if the powers didn't follow them they at least paid them lip service - look how 'collectivist' and 'socialist' our core democratic slogans have been - 'of the people, by the people, for the people', 'e pluribus unum' (from the many, one), 'with liberty and justice for all', etc.
At times, the people have acted on these principles - the progressive movement of the early 20th century against the gilded age, the election of a Democratic super-majority in response to the Great Depression that radically changed our government (for the better), etc.
But why has America lost its mind on the basic idea that too much for too few is a problem? Because there has been a massive propaganda campaign to sell the public on the libertarian and plutocratic ideology, with 'think tanks' and mass media bombarding the messages 24x7, until now it's the accepted 'normal' politics. The Republican Party has been taken over and some Democrats.
Who cares if 90% of the media is owned by a handful of corporations? The public just knows they like their big corporation products, their big corporation entertainment, and don't like politics.
The Republicans just cut $1 trillion from Medicaid, in order to reduce taxes on the rich. Why? Because they opposed Democrats' Medicaid expansion to everyone by challenging it in court; and when they won a partial victory to let states decide whether to expand Medicaid, most Republican states decided not to - so cutting the $1 trillion comes almost entirely from Democratic states.
Pure partisan politics at the expense of millions of people's healthcare who can least afford it. Many Americans will be killed by that action alone.
How many times can taxes on the rich be lowered and allowed by cutting spending on the public and adding to the debt and raising taxes on the public? What will it take for the American people to realize the policies will bring plutocracy?
People need to learn the simple idea that too much inequality is a disaster and needs to be counteracted by the people and the government, and that it's neither wrong nor theft to do so.
Or, they can learn to be serfs again, as mankind has usually been before the liberal American politics created a middle class like never before. At some point, even lip service won't be needed.
