Well, let’s see. The mess in Mississippi is due to powerful 1%ers who want to keep their bought politicians, and the rest of us who voted differently. Who does he support? Does he support a representative republic? Does he, like Suckerberg, want to flood these 99% of the workers with competitors who will accept cheaper wages?
I doubt that opportunity that comes from a private sector that grows faster than the government is part of his plan.
Wait, who's been president the last five years?
To the extent that "inequality" is a problem, high corporate tax rates and crony capitalism are to blame.
Mr. Hanauer is a venture capitalist, very successful, and he is rich by most measures (he’s the one that hillary complained about as being ‘truly well off’).
No gripes about his wealth or his stature.
While his essay is interesting, his conclusion is that the middle class will go away if current policies persist.
His solution? Government. The government must legislate solutions.
My question is why doesn’t the government get out of the way and let us go?
Mr. H has succumbed to his ego - he made it to his status, but no one else is smart enough to do the same. He thinks FedZilla has the answer. Of course, he can buy big enough chunks of FedZilla to satisfy his ego.
Hmmmm.
I would say the top 1% and virtually ALL global interests are funding our decline and supporting the Marxist regimes in power, here and wherever until collapse, and then reshaping the world as a petrie dish begins.
They should fund freedom and conservatives who work, produce and innovate.
Corporate welfare, fascism, govt corruption. None of the aforementioned trespasses reflect true capitalism of any magnitude.
He’s fairly intelligent and fairly articulate but his logic and inference are lacking. One can see in his mannerisms and speech patterns as reflecting his positions that he is steeped in laid back liberalism.
He’s had time to ponder things and learn a few choice terms and concepts.
But he can’t penetrate the veil to the truth. The truth is not in him.
He does identify basic relations and some correlations, but he doesn’t have the sophistication and experience to test his suppositions. He’s basically an amateur philosopher.
Many people with time to ponder can typically like him foresee where things are going, where they are trending. But still they are also often wrong or ineffective.
The vast majority of people, and all progressives, fail to understand that an economy is first and foremost the product of a culture.
The creation of the great American middle class was the product of a great American culture — we were a people who held traditional values in high esteem and exhibited a high degree of individual initiative, hard work, sacrificing for the future, commitment to family and children, etc.
The reason our economy is trending in the direction of a Latin American-style economy of a small class of uber-wealthy and a great mass of poor people longing for socialism along with a relatively small middle class is because our culture is trending in the direction of a Latin American-style culture.
The progressives have caused an explosion in the percent of poor people in the country by massive importation of the Latin American peasantry and by the destruction of the traditional family, especially among African-Americans.
The constituency of the progressives is government employees and government dependents (broadly defined, including for example university faculty living off of bloated tuition subsidized directly or indirectly by government).
What the progressives do is to attack and loot the rest of society in order to reward its constituency of government employees and government dependents, which is why the middle class is weakened and shriveling.
The other thing I meant to say is, socialist, government based solutions to “the inequality problem” will only make it far far worse.
The most unequal regimes of all are the socialist ones. Castro, Hugo Chavez, Mugabe, etc. , all ended up with billions in personal bank accounts.
Free markets are the best way to raise the fortunes of all economic classes - poor, middle or rich. See Milton Freeman for a clear explanation.
Communists always seek to crush the middle class (bourgeoisie). They can better agitate the poor to revolt, and better control the weak and dependent while in charge. The last thing they want a is bunch of uppity people thinking that they make their own decisions.
Communism is really about gaining dictatorial power. The whole “narrative” that Marx created was a consciously designed BS story to get more people to go along with it. As Saul Alinsky put it, destroy the middle class while pretending to be for them. Their whole economic agenda is designed to bring the middle class to heel. Lenin said that taxation and inflation were the millstones between which he would grind the bourgeoisie. The modern left has added regulation to that toolbox.
The ways that they are implementing policies to bring down the middle class are too numerous to count - choking businesses, increasing energy costs, flooding poor immigrants into the labor market, driving up essential (or mandated) costs like health care and building pitfalls into the law to drain nest eggs and make the jump from dependence to becoming self-sufficient harder and higher.
At the age of retirement, I have modest but “comfortable” financial resources, and I feel my die is cast with the super-rich, because my money, however paltry a sum it may represent, still sticks up far enough to be mown by the same scythe.
To have a successful free market capitalist economy, it must be governed by morality.
If the sin of gluttony is not recognized, if there is no shame in excess, the results are as described in this article.
I know several incredibly well off people that live relatively modestly. They are happy people more concerned with their fellow man than with “more”.
Doesn’t it strike everyone that all the current billionaires today are all Socialists and Globalists?
Groan. He loses all reason here:
“If we do something about it, if we adjust our policies in the way that, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression—so that we help the 99 percent and preempt”
Really discouraging. How about looking at his own success and acknowledging that improving peoples’ opportunities and not penalizing self-reliance is the path to success as opposed to a government handout or a make work program? The only ones who did well from FDRs policies were bureaucrats and cronies.
I’ll, after reading this, still vote for pitchforks.
This guy is promoting fdr and what he did as the right thing to do...
inother words, he wants depression and world war...
he is nutsie cuckoo
So, the guy is for wealth redistribution......