The attack on Free Enterprise is relentless.
I agree. We have to stop these Crony Capitalists and their crooked partners in Big Government.
“It’s very difficult to make a democratic system work when you have such extreme inequality,” Piketty told the Times last Sunday, “and such extreme inequality in terms of political influence and the production of knowledge and information.” In fact the mechanisms of democracy seem to be working precisely as the capitalist and petty-bourgeois liberals would like them to work: the question among Democrats these days is just how permanent their majority is likely to be.
What we are in danger of losing because of the “extreme inequality in terms of political influence and the production of knowledge and information” are the classical liberal values of negative freedom, of religious liberty, of equality before the law, of free markets. The inequality of income our bipartisan ruling class sanctimoniously condemns is the very tool it uses to shore up the inequalities of power and communication from which it benefits. Affluent, self-righteous, self-seeking, self-possessed, triumphalist, out of touch, hostile to dissent—this is what oligarchy looks like in the twenty-first century. And it is all in front of one’s nose.