[tynpeddler]

Really excellent point. Transitioning to a capitalist system is extremely difficult because other economic and political systems almost always have much more extreme imbalances in the distribution of money and power (especially if the situation is bad enough to warrant a large change) and introducing a capitalist system lets those folks simply perpetuate uneven wealth/power distributions and in many cases make things worse. The US got around this problem by having huge amounts of land to give away in the west (after conquering it from the Indians of course), and I think Britain kind of got around this problem by creating a system that let their productive merchant class amass large amounts of wealth and partially displace the inefficient aristocracy. France had a rough go of it and had to have multiple revolutions to clear out their nobles and Germany had to lose a few world wars to level things out a bit.

[tsss]

The wealth inequality in the US is now higher than at the time of the French revolution, so I find this assertion to be highly questionable.

[tynpeddler]

Only by some measures and only with the caveat that the methods used to approximate wealth distribution in pre-revolutionary France are not directly analogous to the methods used to measure it today which makes direct comparisons messy. For example, other measures built around the gini coefficient would suggest that now is more equal than pre-revoluitonary France (with the caveat that those methods are also imprecise and built on calculated assumptions). Secondly, my comment is about wealth+power. Despite his wealth and connections, Bezos doesn't have nearly the political power that the second richest man in pre-revolutionary France wielded.