What Fresh Pitchforkery Is This?

Self-described plutocrat Nick Hanauer, a not-even-one-percenter, but higher by dizzying heights event than that, takes a rather well written look at America today ... and every revolution in history.

No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None.  ...

I know there are many of you who are convinced that because you saw a poor kid with an iPhone that one time, inequality is a fiction.

Here’s what I say to you: You’re living in a dream world.  ...

The most ironic thing about rising inequality is how completely unnecessary and self-defeating it is. 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 the revolutionaries and crazies, the ones with the pitchforks—that will be the best thing possible for us rich folks, too.

Hanauer loses me flat when he takes credit for "reminding" the seething masses of our power, but the point that our economy is a "complex ecosystem" an not merely the playground for, say, obscenely (his word) wealthy plutocrats (again, his word) is at least reasonable.  We haven't seen any surfeit of reasonableness in public discourse of late (... in my lifetime, actually - and I'm old), so I'm seeing fit to link and even to quite this guy.

You can skip the first few paragraphs, of background self-aggrandizement, but the general gist is worthwhile - and necessary.  I only wish I thought any of the other plutocrats was really listening, rather than the likely reality, that all the relatively-poor slobs are the ones liking this article.

I believe I do own a pitchfork.  But man would I rather just use my shed for yard implement storage for things I may never use - rather than as a magazine for arms.

When those who set bad examples...pay their workers close to the minimum wage, what they’re really saying is that they’d pay even less if it weren’t illegal. ...

The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics isn’t believing that if the rich get richer, it’s good for the economy. It’s believing that if the poor get richer, it’s bad for the economy.

*Shudder*