The other point is that I think this article made a shitty economic argument. If rich people are staying because they’re making money, and if you stop them from making money then they’ll leave, what’s actually happening is that they are stealing our money while they’re here. It’s not like that money magically showed up, right? It came from somewhere, it came from someone, right? In reality, they’re getting a ton of benefits from the taxpayers. So if the claim is that the economy will suffer when they depart, that’s an interesting question, and it really depends on the details.
I believe that’s called a “boofocracy”.
The wealthy are a cancer. If allowed to metastasize, they will inevitably kill their host civilization.
It has been allowed to metastasize.
The cancer is now running the lab
Be sure, the cancer pulled itself up by its bootstraps and got where it is on merit alone.
Looting is not governing.
“Because of capitalists’ colossal structural power, we’re required to stroke the egos and soothe the anxieties of tantrum throwing elites every time we want to improve society. If we want better education, healthcare, and childcare programs, or to fix our own crumbling infrastructure, or to make our own cities affordable to live in, we are structurally compelled to consider the interests and feelings of the ultrarich, to beg permission from the most wantonly unethical and pathologically narcissistic people on earth.”
It’s frankly ridiculous that despite having more wealth than they know what to do with, they’re still obsessed with the fear that someone else might get a little of it.
Capitalism is a system that rewards people for antisocial behavior. 20,000 years ago, people engaging in antisocial behavior would have been thrown out of the tribe (or executed) for their selfishness and greed, but today they rule.
We can try to use the power of the state to reign them in and keep them under control, but it’s a never-ending struggle. They will try to seize state control, to remove any systems that seek to moderate them. They believe that they are superior human beings, super human even. In their minds, their wealth proves their superiority. They have even convinced large numbers of us that they must be unrestricted, free to pursue maximum profits, otherwise modern civilization will collapse.
Maybe they’re right. Maybe capitalism can’t survive without sociopaths pursuing profits with relatively few restrictions. All the more reason to abolish capitalism, in my opinion, even if that means returning to a more communal existence.
I think you have a pretty romanticized idea about how society was run 20.000 years ago
According to “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow, if one were in the Americas, it could have been pretty okay. Depending on the tribe, a selfish person could have been exiled and many people’s competed to be generous.
Rousseau and the European Enlightenment struggling against the weight of the Catholic Church, may have presented an overly negative view on life long ago. (Source is also “The Dawn of Everything”.)
Anyone talking about society 20,000 years ago is bullshitting. We have no records for how these societies operated anything but a superficial level.
This is Jordan Peterson and Evelutionary Psychology levels of scientific rigor.
No written records, but “we” have found bones and pottery.
But yes, it is all extremely unclear and one should not draw many conclusions or generalities from those.
Great book that everyone should read!
How am I romanticizing the stone ages? By pointing out that members of the tribe who acted selfishly were often executed (and sometimes tortured)? Is that idea a romantic one, in your mind?
Selfishness wasn’t so harshly punished back then because stone age people were noble savages, who were just more righteous than we are today. No, selfishness was so harshly and violently punished (even if the sentence was banishment, that was often a death sentence) because selfish people were a threat to the survival of the tribe, and thus a threat to the survival of every member of the tribe.
Well for starters, the suggestion that everyone was part of the same tribe. If tribes had differences with eachother, how do you think that played out
Also we still have something like 2-4% psychopaths in out gene pools. So they at least lived long enough to reproduce.
I wonder what and when the historical low % of them was.
Disappointed to see Jacobin taking the threat of the wealthy leaving seriously…
It’s fucking New York, raise property tax and raise it more for any person (or corporation without a majority of owners) that lives outside of New York.
Stop fucking acting like we can’t do shit, because the wealthy might retaliate. They haven’t stopped the class war, they’re fighting as hard as possible and willing to cross any line.
Anyone saying we can’t fight back because they might retaliate is ignorant of the entire history of America. They’re already doing everything they can to fuck us over.
If the wealthy say they’ll leave because of progressive the response should be only:
K
And then go back to talking about progressive policy to voters.
Don’t let them stop what’s working by changing the subject.
The article was talking about how Mamdani will have to handle the rich if he is elected. For the rest of us it suggests revolution.
The thing about the rich leaving is… It doesn’t matter if they do. What actual work do they do to produce the profits? Absolutely fuck all.
Imagine for a moment that all billionaires suddenly left the county. They’d effectively be abandoning their properties, which so long as progressive policies are in place, wouldn’t create a power vacuum where another rich asshole steps in and does the same or worse than the last one.
WE are the producers. Implement progressive policy, make work more fair and everyone except the leaches (ownership leaches, not the disabled) benefit.
Again, as you stated, progressive policy is the way to first, make the leaches leave, but also make the leaving not further destructive to society as a whole.
They’d effectively be abandoning their properties,
They wouldn’t…
They can’t take a fucking skyscraper with them, and they still pay property tax where it’s at.
That’s why I’m saying if you wanted to keep them, you’d drastically raise property tax, with a reduction for states residents. Especially when talking housing, that would be huge.
A homestead taxed at 5% or an investment property at 25% means investment firms aren’t just going to stop buying, they’ll start selling. Which would solve but at least alleviate the housing crisis.
Like, specifically NYC, they’re in a weird situation they want to reduce the price of real estate. It can’t happen too fast tho or it 08 all over again.
But the best thing to reduce real estate prices, is taxing the fuck out of investment properties. Maybe throw a multi-year plan out there so it gets more and more painful every year. That way it’s not a fire sale all at once.
We have plenty of options, we just need to elect politicians willing to use them
Right. Rich people leaving New York is a feature, not a bug. It’s not like they pay taxes and any “investment” they do is extractive (eg landlords).
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
The article ends with
This is not the arrangement of a free society. This is the stuff of kings and feudal lords ruling over serfs. It is not befitting a democracy. And for a country so devoted to the principle of freedom and so proud of our history of rejecting illegitimate monarchical authority, we should be pissed off about it. Americans shouldn’t have to grovel pathetically before oligarchs to prevent them from nuking our economy as punishment for trying to attain an infinitesimal fraction of the privilege they enjoy — privileges which, of course, are already more lopsidedly distributed to the wealthy than ever.
If he wins the general election, Madani will have to proceed carefully, calling the wealthy’s bluff enough to pass meaningful reforms without setting into motion a devastating process in which those bluffs become reality. The rest of us, though, should be clear about one thing: what we’re seeing now is a tiny minority trying to hold an entire city — an entire society — hostage to its own interests, using its structural leverage in the economy to undermine the democratic will of ordinary people.
Surely there’s a better economic and political system than one where we have to coddle these villains every time we want to raise the standard of living for the majority. We don’t have to put up with this.
Imo. they aren’t buckling to it. The article points out that under the current system it is a real threat to the politician Mamdani. So it is up to the people to back him up in pushing for meaningful change as well as put the pressure for real change to the corrupted system.
devastating process in which those bluffs become reality
??? He wants to raise their effective tax by a few points, from like 8 to 11%. This will devastate nobody. Meanwhile the working class is paying 30% or more.
These rich fucks can stfu, and yes jacobin is both sidesing it in the typical fashion of mainstream media.
Unlike other classifications of people, it’s relatively easy to create new rich people. Isn’t that what these people think the American Dream is all about? Is this group of rich people opposed to the American Dream?
Any rich idiot who could stomach moving to Florida has already done so. Or maintains multiple residences in New York and Florida.
You know, like Trump and Epstein do.
They are losing control, they are scared, they will attempt to to divert the attention of the public with war. The aristocracy will be dismantled or we will be annihilated.
Foreal
I think this is inherent to humans. No matter what system, this is the natural end point.
For now
Mostly whiny rich LAZY WHITE people. The Civil War was fought because white people were so lazy they didn’t want to do the work themselves.
Why bring race into it? Poor white people are natural allies in curtailing monied interests are much as anyone else. Driving wedges that aren’t along class lines is only to the benefit of the rich.
To be fair, the term “white people” was created by rich landowners to get poor Europeans to turn against the black people they worked alongside in the fields. White isn’t a race.
All human concept of race is just where people decided to draw arbitrary lines.
The fuck they are. They are too stupid to realize they are being played.
I’d say they’re too propagandized and too squeezed by living their lives in this system to realize they’re being played. It has nothing to do with the color of their skin and could happen to anyone.
You don’t know your history do you? Poor whites have always been the arm of the rich. Any time there is even a chance of solidarity, poor whites are the first to sell out because of the sweet, sweet taste of white privilege.
You know who did most of the lynchings? Poor whites. You who overwhelmingly voted for Trump? Poor whites.
Fuck this “they are mislead” gaslighting bullshit. I’d rather have no allies than a poor white person as an ally because at least I can trust myself.
“Although women as a whole have historically voted for Democrats, white women have not. Instead, over the last 72 years, a plurality of white women have voted for the Democratic candidate only twice, in 1964 and 1996.”
I understand all that, but class solidarity really is the only way forward.
Fancy words but when humanity is put to the test, they always fail. You’re better off simply focusing on yourself. The rich sure are.
If nobody tries to make anything better, nothing will ever get better for sure. This kind of defeatist attitude also only benefits the rich.
The Battle of Blair Mountain didn’t happen. Got it.
John Brown wasn’t poor and in the end, he didn’t accomplish anything as he was executed.
Ah, so you don’t know what the Battle of Blair Mountain even is.
Spoiler: John Brown wasn’t there.
Found the American! Do you realize the majority of the world is neither white nor American and this doesn’t apply, whereas this article does?
You’re right. How’s AFD, Reform UK, Five Points, Sansieto, and National Rally coming along?
Now as for billionaires, Elon Musk is South African. Peter Thiel is German. Bezos and Zuckerberg are American. Pinchal and Nadella are Indian. Nigel Ferange is British.
Now let’s look at Brexit. The UK had the chance to show that they progressed as well as show that Brexit was a bad idea that would hurt them all, but xenophobia won.
Let’s look at Israel. Now October 7th was an unfortunate catastrophe that no one deserved but rather than demand better from their leaders, Israel has plunged right head first into genocide.
Canada just recently BARELY fought off a right wing resurgence and that was ONLY due to Trump’s threats.
Replace poor whites with poor natives of any country and my point will not have changed. The billionaires have won. They played the long game while we have fucking settled for reality tv, social media, and eroding rights.
https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#517324be3d78
Just within the top-25 I see Jensen Huang, Mukesh Ambani, Carlos Slim, Changpeng Zhao, Zhong Shanshan.
White people are over-represented in the list, but there’s plenty of non-white billionaires that are just as problematic as their white counterparts. The vast, vast majority of white people are not billionaires. Racial division is a distraction that serves the billionaires.
By other white people who found that unacceptable.
Until Lincoln said black people should vote. All those “progressive” northern people all of a sudden became racist.
I think thats just in your head. Supposedly lincoln was about back to africa and the civil war was not about one segment believing in full equality at that point in time. They just felt slavery was wrong and that black people were human. I mean remember women got sufferage after black males. Also we are talking averages. Im 100% sure many individuals recognized equality between humans but the norm changed over time and more importantly the law. This is one reason I find juneteenth as wierd because it was the amendment when it was codified in law and after all the world has slavery still and its been done by individuals in the us in this millenium. The critical thing is that its a crime now to do that.
Came here to say how refreshing it is to read an article about wealthy jerks that talks about reality rather than RACE OR GENDER.
There’s no need to be racist and that wasn’t what the civil war was about.
There was no threat of slavery being federally outlawed, Lincoln’s entire inaugural address was about how slaves were property and no one was going to fuck with the institution of slavery.
http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/1inaug.htm
The South wanted a “strong” federal government that could force Northern states to “deport” any Black people in the North to the South where they’d be made slaves.
And Lincoln wouldn’t do that either. He felt the federal government had no say on slaverly.
So the South seceded, and when the federal government said they couldn’t that was the official cause of the war. Whether or not states had the option to leave the union.
Repeating that the Civil war was about if slavery could be legal, is not only reductionist it’s repeating century old propaganda spread by wealthy slave owners to make it sound better than reality.
Lincoln did t even start thinking about outlawing slavery until the war was starting to drag on, and that was solely as an economic sanction because wealthy Europeans had started buying up Southern plantations and those funds were being used to prolong the war.
By explicitly outlawing slavery, it cratered the speculative real estate market and those funds being cut off shortened the war.
Shits more complicated than what they told us in sixth grade.
You have upset your Ferengi masters!
