I recently listened to a TED program by Nick Hanauer. It was entitled “Beware Fellow Plutocrats, the Pitchforks are Coming!” He talks about how capitalism concentrates capital and will ultimate destroy the society. I found that his thoughts rang a bell with me. I would like to suggest that it would make a good topic for a debate by our esteemed gentlemen.
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4 replies on “The Pitchforks are Coming!”
The thought I had as I listened to the back stage was that when you get into the cycle of monopoly and govt/corp partnership you’re leaving the Capitalist (free market) system and thus I wouldn’t say IT has the seeds of its own destruction but can lead into a system more prone to falling down.
If the flow of information is working, monopoly should be hard to reach as competitors are found and patronized by the consumer. That’s the weak link in the free market as I see it (weak link in democracy too).
None of us are wise enough to dictate to another what he should do with his life. Far too many of us do not seem wise enough to do that for ourselves. How then can a disconnected parasitical elite (aka government) be trusted to do that for anyone let alone for everyone? They can’t.
Yet the governing elite eventually presumes they have the power of god to dictate to reality what it must be without respect to what is and can be. Then work to force the citizens to deliver what cannot be delivered. The end result is wholesale human sacrifice and collapse of the society governed. Every past civilization has ended this way. Can our civilization avoid such an end? Not if we let our governing elite have their way.
We’re using this as the seed for an episode of Right Angle this week. Thanks, Rod.
Oh, the pitchforks are coming alright. I don’t think it’ll be directly because of income inequality though. He mentions the Seattle $15 minimum, which, last I heard, wound up costing low income people $125 per month. I wouldn’t be surprised if that movement had his financial backing. That’ll be what brings out the pitchforks, using their wealth to impose their political preferences. I don’t know if we have the stupidest, most pig ignorant, political, intellectual and business elites in the history of the world but we’ve got to be in the running.