Telling them not to play with fire doesn't work nearly as well.
Our billionaires are partying like it's September 1929. It will soon be November.
There's a book I've been trying to find the time to read. It's called "The Great Leveler" and it's about how societal collapse leading to the destruction of grotesque inequality often takes place only in the context of catastrophe.
Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lived lives of luxury and great wealth. None of their jewels forestalled the blade of the guillotine.
Elon Musk and our other rulers are human beings whether they know as much or not. Their lives depend on the loyalty and courage of the guards protecting them. So did Louis XVI so depend. Without loyal guards, Elon Musk is just a naked man wearing clothes, like any of us. If one cuts him he will bleed. If he has to pee, he needs to find a toilet. If overthrown he'll need to find a bucket in a cell.
I doubt those in the Musk class have any interest in reading the Great Leveler. I actually encountered the book on the bookshelf of a wealthy person, not one in the billionaire class, but an intellectual in the millionaire class.
Basically though wealth in our culture is paper and electrons on a computer disk. It has no real supernatural powers in the physical world. A building doesn't change form if its owner dies. It is still a building irrespective of who owns it. The steel in a girder will have the same molecular structure if its sold or expropriated.
After the 1930s the Great Leveler was the World War, one of the most tragic and violent episodes in human history.
This is not merely about a generic failure of our party to confront theirs. It is far deeper.
Greatness is achieved by only by facing great challenges. Without the Civil War a President Lincoln would have been as memorable as Millard Fillmore. If such greatness exists it will emerge from our party.
There is a Lincoln or an FDR among us in our party, no such person in theirs. Who that person is I do not know. I will die believing, nonetheless that he or she exists, waiting to rise.
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