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by Super_Jambo
3303 days ago
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Looking at the charts from Capital in the 21st Century [1] it's obvious that previous relative equality of wealth was largely due to the incredibly destruction of the two world wars. Factories blown up, colonial lands lost and war debts inflated away wiped out many fortunes.[2] So the reduced power of post war rich, combined with fear of communism resulted in the Democratic Socialist consensus that gave us high taxes and a big middle class. (And Vietnam but I digress). Since fear of Communism has eased and the rich have again massed giant fortunes there's little to stop them weakening the rules that prevent our Democracies from being bought. To me this is a compelling explanation for how you end up with Trump running against Clinton two historically disliked candidates. Almost everything in the news is just noise to the slow grinding power of wealth accumulation. Occasionally you get a glimpse as WaPo is bought by Bezos, Trump gets elected and Zuck clearly starts to form some presidential ambitions. But largely everything is a distraction to pull your eyeballs, after all that's what our media is paid to do. [1] http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014Fig... [2] Capital in Britain 1700-2010: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/pdf/F3.1.pdf |
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