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from the picthfork-futures-accelerate-to-new-highs dept.
Nick Hanauer, a self-described "plutocrat" says history shows that the current economic and governmental situation can't last, and the USA should should get busy changing before the system breaks down.
From the memo to his "Fellow Zillionaires":
I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I'm no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can't even imagine.
But let's speak frankly to each other. I'm not the smartest guy you've ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all - I can't write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future.
If we don't do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. 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. It's not if, it's when.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @10:08PM
Before money existed, there was no logic to owning way more stuff than you could use.
...then somebody invented coins and credit and it became a dick measuring contest for guys who are insecure about their manhood, gathering up more wealth than they could spend in multiple lifetimes.
Back in the days before cities, when clusters of humans didn't get larger than about 150 individuals and COMMUNITY was still an actual thing, this kind of behavior would get you banished as an anti-social asshole.
The community spirit was still working great in the Stone Age cultures of the Western Hemisphere [wikipedia.org] when white guys first showed up.
Everywhere that the pestilence of European conquest touched, that served to displace and destroy The Sharing Economy.
-- gewg_