The Great Debate UK
from The Great Debate:
Sympathy for the Plutocrat
This is a response to an excerpt from Chrystia Freeland’s Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, published this week by Penguin Press.
It’s great to be what you people are now calling a plutocrat. I know. I am one.
We plutocrats live incredible lives, surrounded by luxury and insulated from risk and discomfort. Things have gone very well for us over the last several years. Since George Bush left office, the stock market has doubled, we got a (sweet!) $700 billion rescue of the financial system, and corporate profits are at a 50-year high. BOOYA!
The growing economic distance between people like me and the little people like you hasn’t been this great in a long, long time. You may call that inequality. We call it freedom. But if things are going to continue to go this well, you people need to get with the program. Here, I’d like to have a frank discussion about that.
from The Great Debate:
The billionaires next door
This is an excerpt from Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, published this week by Penguin Press.
Pittsburgh was one of the smelters of America’s Gilded Age. As the industrial revolution took hold there, Andrew Carnegie was struck by the contrast between “the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer.” Human beings had never before lived in such strikingly different material circumstances, he believed, and the result was “rigid castes” living in “mutual ignorance” and “mutual distrust” of one another.
