If We Eat the Rich, Who Will That Inconvenience?

Elmo Musk is back out there challenging the average numbskull to imagine what the world would be like without billionaires. This is the funniest part of the whole AI panic: the idea that when AI becomes prevalent, the average worker, skilled-laborer, healthcare workers, and everyone who keeps the wheels turning will be out of work and the hedgefund goobers will be at the top of the stack.

Elmo hasn’t made a useful decision in his whole pedophile, nepobaby life and he’s the poster boy for the useless rich kid. He thinks his money and intellectual “contributions” are what make his “businesses” work, but the actual business relies on the people who know how to code, design and build cars and rockets, can do the accounting and pay the bills, and sell the crap his companies build. Every AI program in existence today would do Elmo’s “job” better than him in a heartbeat. AI could easily be programmed to behave like an entitled, racist, selfish asshole, so it could replace Elmo in every aspect of what passes for his “life.” Likewise, the hedgefund banksters don’t “contribute” anything useful to the businesses they gobble-up, sell off the functioning divisions and assets, and overpay themselves (as “consultants”) and the deadbeat mismanagement they bribe into allowing the barbarians into the corporate castle. Like Musk and the rest of the billionaires, they are leaches draining the life from the businesses they contaminate and the nation they are destroying.

Americans heard this “you can’t survive without us” nonsense from “businessmen” who created government-funded monopolies back in the 1890s. Luckily, after repeated economic crashes, depredations from the overbearing overlords of wealth that caused entire states’ economies and populations to collapse, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. became the 26th president of the United States and put a temporary end to the American Oligarchy. It wasn’t the intention of either the always-flawed Republican Party or the Marching Moron American public to either elect Roosevelt or to stand on their rarely-used hind feet, it was pure and simple luck. It was a well-placed bullet that took out the Republican establishment’s President, William McKinley, and dropped the right man into the right job at the right time for one of the few, brief, good moments in American history. The inflation-adjusted “billionaires” of the day (Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, E.H. Harriman, Henry Clay Frick, Hetty Green, Jay Cooke, James Hill, and a few lesser-known figures of American “royalty”) were just as convinced as Musk that the country couldn’t survive without them. And they were also wrong.

Labor, invention, science, and the necessities of life, culture, economies, and progress do not need the “influence” of gross wealth, they struggle to survive in the presence of them. In spite of the “conservative” interference from stagnate, paralyzed capital held closely and selfishly by the entitled rich, actual progress can barely keep its head above the sewage. Whether that wealth was inherited (Musk, Gates, Theil, Bezos, etc) and, occasionally, expanded on through luck and/or skill or initiated through hard work, luck, and innovation, once it is captured and hoarded by the rich and powerful it becomes a roadblock for everyone else.

The uneducated MAGA crowd, who keep babbling about a time when “America was great,” are likely talking about the post-WWII era when the top income tax bracket was more than 90%. That was when the United States, representing a few ideals that the rest of the world wanted to emulate, was at its most productive, creative, and optimistic. Of course, the part of the 1950s that MAGA wants to return to is the Jim Crow racist bullshit because, even 1950s technology and education levels is beyond the capacity of Trump’s beloved “uneducated.”

Obviously (I hope), the best way to “eat the rich” is to tax those useless deadbeat hoarders into insignificance and put all of that idle capital back to work rebuilding the country they tried to destroy. When America was great, in 1950, the top federal estate tax rate was 77%, applied to net estate values that exceeded $10 million, working down to as little as 3% for smaller estates with a $60,000 estate tax threshold. The purpose of inheritance taxes was to prevent an idle aristocracy from becoming powerful. Reagan convinced the Marching Morons that estate taxes were “death taxes” with a math-free argument that only made sense if you were either on the receiving end of the estate or too stupid to know how taxation worked (every MAGAot who ever lived). It’s hard to imagine today, but those taxes were intended to pay off the World War II national debt (to itself and US citizens, not foreign investors) and to rebuild and catch-up on the time, prosperity, and progress lost during that war. Since Nixon, US voters have been convinced that passing responsibility on to future generations is not only a right and privilege, but some kind of magical get-out-of-responsibility-free card in perpetuity. Without exaggeration, that is how fuckin’ stupid American voters are today.

Because we are living in a country that has ALWAYS despised education and knowledge and held a special reverence for violence, we’re unlikely to use the “best way” to resolve vast, irrational, self-destructive economic inequality. Americans resort to violence, first, and, occasionally and briefly, think later. That is largely true for humans everywhere, with a few impressive, notable exceptions. The French Revolution is mostly remembered for out-of-control excess and injustice. There was plenty of that in the American Revolution, too, on both sides. Today, the filthy rich have their own private armies. With massive taxpayer assistance, they have built private military organizations that are likely near-equal to democratic governments’ national defense forces. If the rebelling public imagines that “storming the castle” will be a practical way to “eat the rich,” we’re going to see an all-out battle for . . . everything. It won’t be pretty and that war is entirely capable of swamping the world in violence, destruction, irrecoverable and disastrous environmental damage, and the odds of success aren’t worth betting on.