Plutocratic Populism Pays

What’s with rich liberals who blast other people for being rich?

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

 

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10 thoughts on “Plutocratic Populism Pays

  1. The traditional way of american life is over for most people. Get a part time job as a teen, save for a car, maybe go to college if your grades are good enough and use your part time job along with help from family to pay for books and tuition. Meet someone to marry and grow a family with while saving for a permanent home. Save for emergencies, save for your old age, save, save, save. Get 5% return on your passbook savings without having to invest in the stock market or some other investment vehicle. If you want to play the market with extra money because you believe in a Company like GE or P&G will grow your investment then go ahead but if you try commodities and get wiped out then you did so with eyes wide open. Now everything is leveraged for the larger investor to profit. Of course you could have put $1000 in Google, Apple, and a few other tech stocks over the last 6 years and done very well but if you didn’t like google or apple or microsoft for a variety of reasons politically or personally you would have missed out. Buffet is a perfect example of how wealth has no principles only its master. Buffet was once a capitalist now he’s a crony capitalist. I know, I know, things change, life goes on but the disposable society we’ve become will be our undoing. Try someone on or a gender or a religion or a job or a commitment or a whatever. If you don’t like the way it fits then just discard it and move on. This shift from americans saving to americans spending has much much deeper consequences to our well being as a civil society then just the dangers of consumerism it sheds the discipline and patience that is required to attain things of value in life and this will lead to violence and chaos in our Country. People who don’t have will steal from those who do. This is the ultimate consequence of not instilling the proper values in our american children. Why would anyone save if your money just becomes worth less day by day. We have allowed our financial system, universities and pop culture guide our children into this B.S. situation where if you don’t get it right now, I mean right this very minute then you’ll be left behind everyone else.

  2. You’ve never met a poor Marxist because they don’t exist. No one but the wealthy have the privilege of proclaiming that what they done, or worse, what they’ve been handed is somehow evil on its face for everyone else. Or at least everyone they don’t associate with. Moreover, the people who scream ‘power to the people’ are precisely the ‘people’ they want the people to hand power to. This is why populism and fascism have always been dance partners.

  3. All this is true, and yet my 9th-grade daughter brought home the notion, presumably absorbed at school or from friends, that Republicans are the party of the rich and Democrats represent the downtrodden. Thought I had her pointed in the right direction, and even so she’s in danger of being indoctrinated. Can’t help wondering how many other kids don’t have someone at home to correct the nonsense.

  4. Maybe Shakespeare was wrong, first we shouldn’t kill all the lawyers… perhaps… mainstream journalists?

    To fix a country, call things by their true names.

    Mainstream journalists have an evil bug in their brains that seems to make this impossible. (i.e. Wrath of Khan)

    Wonder who could charm that evil bug out of their brains? It would be fun to watch it crawl out an ear!

  5. “Modern liberalism is an ideology of the super-wealthy in alliance with those who need government assistance — often in opposition to the less liberal middle class, which bears the brunt of higher taxes, more regulations, and zero interest on savings. The vast growth of local, state, and federal government and their workforces, the huge increase in pensions and benefits, the spectacular rise in the number of people on government support, coupled with zero interest for those with modest savings, represents a huge transference of wealth from the middle class to those classes beneath them — even as the resulting booming stock market has enriched the already rich. In some sense, strident populist rhetoric is a psychological tic, an acknowledgment that Obama progressivism has all but destroyed the middle class. ”

    Another way of putting this, is that the power elite have seen the way out of the problem of democracy, inasmuch as democracy allows the populace to wrest power and assets from first the king, then his barons, then the wealthy.

    But the modern rich have seen the way out of this. The trick is to ‘hire’ a vast tranch of state supported voters, that will support your programs, as long as you, the wealthy, give them a basic minimum, often for free, and murmur sweet sounds to flatter their egos. Then the wealthy can hang onto their assetts, and strip the more numerous middle class instead, in order to pay off their voters. Since the middle class are more numerous, it’s actually a more sustainable economic model anyway, since even the vast wealth of the plutocrats, would not be enough to fund the massive social programs needed, since there are so few of them. In this model, the mass importation of immigrant voters also makes perfect sense, since they are going to be even cheaper to subsidize than your national vote mob, apart from being cheaper to employ in your factories and farms.

  6. Rampant moral degradation an apparent symptom of America today is largely due to an abandonment of basic principles such what is found in the bible like Timothy 6:10a: For the love of money is one of the root cause of all evil…

    That verse has been around for thousands of years. Those who love money will always come up with any rationalization to justified hoarding it, this is a common ploy of the rich and powerful and the elite.

  7. The frightening assumption is that this dissolution of the middle class can go on forever without eventually repeating the violent history seen in other countries, even that of our own. Eating cake won’t be an option with only crumbs on the plates outside the castles.

  8. I work for a large corporation that is doing everything it can to move out the older people so they can higher younger ones at lower wages and lower health care premiums. With no pensions. They even know they are going to be sued for age discrimination but they don’t care. The CEO, CFO and other executives live in gated communities with armed guards and immigrant low paid help.
    They have no idea what they are doing. They have no idea what kind of country their children or children’s, children will be living in.
    The gates are not high enough and the moats are not wide enough.

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