[masfuerte]

Money is power. That is the problem with extreme wealth. It provides unaccountable power outside the democratic process. It is not surprising that an already powerful man wants even more power, but I do not understand why anyone else would go along with this.

[kraquepype]

> It provides unaccountable power outside the democratic process.

Doesn't help when the government isn't maintaining or enforcing guardrails for the ultra wealthy.

This is a war on the middle class. Free and fair elections are the last hope that most have to resolve it peacefully, so of course those are under attack.

> I do not understand why anyone else would go along with this.

I've been asking myself that for 10 years. Through both traditional and social media manipulation, they found a way to get enough people to vote against their best interests, and normalize the behavior, that it doesn't matter if a large portion of the country is still paying attention and asking those questions.

[dualvariable]

They've leveraged the culture wars to the point that a good chunk of the rural, economically disadvantaged voters are cool with a northeastern elite billionaire looting the country.

[throw0101a]

“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” — Lyndon B. Johnson, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-wh...

[dualvariable]

And the condescending tone of that quote only further strengthens the culture wars--liberals love it.

[throw0101a]

The quotation is not condescending to "the lowest white man", but rather is explaining a political/propaganda strategy that was active at the time. Up until that time the racists were inter-mixed between the two parties:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixiecrat

but it was the GOP that actively sought to recruit them:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

The quotation was describing the creation of the very culture wars we're still living with today. And the evidence shows that this is still going on:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness

[krapp]

And the fact that people respond to it by attacking the very groups they've been set against rather than the government and elites manipulating them proves how well it works.

See also the apopleptic rage the rural right went into when Hillary Clinton made her "deplorables" remark. Even though she was clearly and explicitly talking about the white supremacists and racists infiltrating the Trump camp - something she was entirely correct about mind you - they chose to trauma bond with the white supremacists and rally around a billionaire pedophile rather than concede a point to a "liberal" in good faith.

[dualvariable]

Liberals are going to find it very comforting that they're not one of "the lowest white men". The people the quote is referring to won't be persuaded at all. It solves nothing. There's no solution offered to the propaganda problem. It is the flip side to the culture wars that it is describing.

[ilaksh]

It's a structural problem in our socio-technical system. You can't separate money and government, because "corruption" to some degree is the default state. Yes there are exceptions, but the opposite if the bad apple concept. You have to get lucky to find the good apples. Which means there is some structural insufficiency in the concept of money and government.

[dgellow]

FWIW the original meaning of the bad apple idiom is that a single one spoils the whole set

[andsoitis]

> It's a structural problem in our socio-technical system.

it has always been like this, has it not? almost by definition the more resources you have the more power you have. this is how the universe works.

[ElevenLathe]

There have historically been obstacles and countervailing forces preventing accumulation to get to the point it is now. The classical example is labor organizing, which has been decimated in the last few decades, but that is just one symptom of how improvements in communication and transportation technology (often shorthanded as "globalization" due to the new political forms it has incentivized -- free trade, "decolonization", financialization, etc.) have radically tilted the table toward capital. Money is now transnational, but people, culture, and solidarity are not. There were once very severe practical limits to how closely one could control an expansive international portfolio of capital (mercantilist trade policies, primitive/incompatible/nonexistent financial infrastructure, slow communications, etc.), and those have been relaxed considerably.

[afavour]

Yes but there are degrees of it and right now we're pivoting towards that power being centralized with the rich once more.

Once upon a time only landowners were able to vote. Eventually that changed as the powerful realized that it was in their interest to share power, because they are vastly outnumbered and can have their riches taken away from them. It feels like we're getting closer and closer to today's rich classes having to learn that lesson again.

[ilaksh]

Yes that's what money is almost by definition and government has always had that relationship. But realize that money and government are technologies and we can create new versions or even new paradigms.

[andsoitis]

> But realize that money and government are technologies and we can create new versions or even new paradigms.

I'm intrigued. What is a paradigm to replace money?

Musk is predicting that in around 10 years' time money would no longer be relevant, but doesn't have a framing of what would make up for the things that money does. I think he misunderstands money.

[everforward]

Not really, because converting resources into power required other humans.

A huge pile of gold isn’t inherently powerful, you need someone willing to accept gold to do what you want. They would also generally be intimately involved in doing the thing, so you paid premiums for dangerous or unpalatable work.

These days technology lets you turn resources into planes, tanks, drones, etc in a way where 100 soldiers with limitless resources probably beat 1000 with a constrained supply line pretty consistently.

You see the same with domestic conflict. Once upon a time, finding and tracking down revolutionaries was a tedious, labor-intensive process that usually resulted in failure. Now those resources can be converted into surveillance that is much more effective, and much less reliant on another human being willing to help.

[geremiiah]

To be fair, this is only true in western countries. It's not true, in for example Russia or China. Or to be more accurate, in Russia and China, no matter how many hundreds of billions you own, you won't be able to bend the party to your will.

[johnthewise]

Is that the case or is it because people's opinions matter less over there and powerful people rather use their capital to influence 'important' people behind closed doors&we're not aware of it thus assume it doesn't happen?

[xboxnolifes]

They did say for democratic processes.

[tavavex]

I don't think you know Russia that well. The overlap between the oligarch class and the government itself is massive. It's speculated that Putin himself may be one of the richest people on Earth, because he and his allies have placed themselves at the peak of their government and their economy.

Now, it's not a complete overlap between the government and the rich, and there are points where the two sides may disagree - some oligarchs have been imprisoned and killed before. But if you as an oligarch know how to say the right things and associate with the right people, you'll be allowed to do almost anything you want with impunity. It's an incredibly corrupt might-makes-right society where the hierarchies of political and economic power have already settled and aligned with one another. Most oligarchs don't get to dictate what happens in the government, but their arguments are basically the only ones that they even listen to.

[Jenk]

> I do not understand why anyone else would go along with this.

Aspirations.

[Lord-Jobo]

Which have ignorance as their root cause. Ignorance of the type of people that become ultra wealthy, and ignorance of the odds of becoming one of them.

We should “listen” to these people with the same attitude as we do”listen” to gas station lottery addicts, instead we give them WAY too much credibility.

[JKCalhoun]

I don't buy that. You can't convince me someone shopping at Dollar General has aspirations of becoming Elon-Musk-wealthy.

[Jenk]

"That guy has lots of money so he must be successful, clever, and probably correct, so I'm going to support them" is still an aspiration - and you probably should realise that there are people in dollar stores that think "One day, that could be me."

[red-iron-pine]

"temporarily embarrassed millionaires"

[ajsnigrutin]

This sentiment is pretty popular amongst some of the younger working people... they work, pay a lot of taxes for everything, and then get outvoted by pensioners who retired under "old" laws and now get a higher pension than they ever earned while working (i'm talking from a position of government pensions, not the american save-for-yourself style). So, old people vote and decide, and young people get the bill for that.

eg the comments here: https://old.reddit.com/r/EconomyCharts/comments/1u8d9mq/olde...

The "if you contribute more, your vote should be worth more" sentiment would change a lot, because many actually rich people don't really pay a lot of taxes compared to higher middle class (engineers, doctors,..). If your vote was worth eg "log10(your-income-taxes + 1)" (to make buying a lot of votes impossible), more power would go to higher educated and higher paid people and less to people who don't contribute to society (at least not financially). Again, i'm talking about a society where pretty much everyone who works also pays income tax, and you're not cutting out the majority of poor people.

Would it work? Probably not, but i understand the sentiment.

[everforward]

My phrasing of it is that democracy is underpinned by a shared belief in a collective destiny. If we all vote well, we all do well together and if we vote poorly then we all do poorly together, on average.

Thus it feels like breaking that contract to have a substantial block of voters who will not only be recipients of increased benefits without ever having to pay more, but can run benefits programs into the ground and kill them without worry because they’ll die before that happens.

They don’t have any skin in the game. They stand to benefit, but never really lose.

I’ve not really worked that into a functional idea, though. The gist of my thought process is that you shouldn’t be able to vote on things where the delay on systemic issues occurring is beyond your life expectancy. So I could vote to change social security today, but probably not when I retire.

I have no idea how to quantify that delay in any reasonably objective way, though, and that’s where my idea falls apart.

It seems likely to become another political dog and pony show where the parties try to get arbitrary age cutoffs to get a demographic advantage. The idea that it would force parties to cater to younger voters more is interesting but I’m not sure a net positive. The impacts are too wide for me to gauge any kind of third order effects.

[weard_beard]

I don’t understand what there is to gain for anyone by making the implicit system we have today explicit?

[buellerbueller]

Maybe it is a clever play to shine light on the problem? (I doubt, but can't entirely discount, it.)

[shuwix]

Sorry to knock you out of your cloud.

In democracy, power comes from demos. In capitalism, power comes from capital. Demos doesn't have concentrated capital.

Try starting a new party without capital and backing from people tied to mainstream media.

People never had power. Whenever they've thought they have power (revolutions), they fought for one new power hungry scumbag to replace old power hungry scumbag.

[noncoml]

> they fought for one new power hungry scumbag to replace old power hungry scumbag.

Because, as Plato argued, the best rulers are the ones that don’t want to rule, as ruling is a very heavy duty, if not burden.

If you strip corruption, it has no rewards. Instead you have to put up with “scambags” accusing for the things the corruption they would do if they had the power.

Why does this sound familiar?

[shuwix]

Plato was philosopher. Not sociopath. For sociopaths, power over other people is only thing that matters. It's not a burden, money is nice, but it's mostly a tool to have more power.