We’re A Plutocracy, In Case You Didn’t Notice

by tristero

A chart from this article illustrating the dramatic increase since the 30’s in the percentage of American income hoovered up by the wealthiest Americans:

I usually don’t like what Fukuyama has to say (The End of History was one of those classic Big Ideas that explains nothing concrete but still had the potential to generate lots of very real mischief ), but this is spot on. Writing about Plutocracy, the theme of the latest issue of The American Interest hes says:

This is not, however, what this issue of The American Interest means by plutocracy. We mean not just rule by the rich, but rule by and for the rich. We mean, in other words, a state of affairs in which the rich influence government in such a way as to protect and expand their own wealth and influence, often at the expense of others. As the introductory essay to this issue shows, this influence may be exercised in four basic ways: lobbying to shift regulatory costs and other burdens away from corporations and onto the public at large; lobbying to affect the tax code so that the wealthy pay less; lobbying to allow the fullest possible use of corporate money in political campaigns; and, above all, lobbying to enable lobbying to go on with the fewest restrictions. Of these, the second has perhaps the deepest historical legacy.

This isn’t too bad, either:

Scandalous as it may sound to the ears of Republicans schooled in Reaganomics, one critical measure of the health of a modern democracy is its ability to legitimately extract taxes from its own elites. The most dysfunctional societies in the developing world are those whose elites succeed either in legally exempting themselves from taxation, or in taking advantage of lax enforcement to evade them, thereby shifting the burden of public expenditure onto the rest of society.

h/t, Why Evolution Is True.