General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: With soaring cost of living, San Francisco businesses can't find new low-cost employees [View all]dreamnightwind
(4,775 posts)The oligarchs accumulate wealth to use it to shape the world with their own ideas as much as to pass it on to their kids. I would like a world shaped by the interests of those whose needs are not met not by the ideas of people who have never known such needs, can't understand them in any tangible way, and in many cases, as you suggest, just view less fortunate people as losers.
So my point here is we would also need a way to curb this kind of influence. they create foundations and institutions to shape the world to their liking that persist long after they leave this earth. Inheritance won't touch that. A maximum wage, or better a cap on total compensation, some way of preventing this wealth from accumulating to that degree in the first place, might have a better shot at returning the balance of power from the few very rich to democratically run institutions.
The other component of course is putting the democracy back in government. Another current OP had a link down thread to this study, I'll just paste here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251724264#post52
http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPPS%2FPPS12_03%2FS1537592714001595a.pdf&code=e40d65fc61c134913e3ad43a422129d3
Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page
What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of populistic democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
The fix to this of course is public funding of elections, and ending revolving door relationships between government and industry.
There's a lot to do, and it will all be difficult to achieve. It starts by identifying the tasks, electing a leader who believes in them (Bernie for the win), and fighting like hell no matter how many times we are defeated.