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I suppose my view is that wealth isn't power, power is power. Any coalition capable of unseating the billionaire class would by definition hold more power than the current wealthy. I'm not sure it really makes much difference whether it's a Langley spook, Hague bureaucrat, tech billionaire, or CCP party member that holds the reins to ultimate power and status.
As long as technology exists you'll get centralization of power, but as long as centralized technological power doesn't exist you get Haiti or South Sudan, the Hobbesian life in a state of nature.
Extension du domaine de la lutte. The progressive ideal of re-distributing wealth is at least logically possible, but it's fundamentally impossible to re-distribute everyone a big house in the best locations and a high status mate. If being better than others is essential to happiness, then perhaps that is humanity's punishment for eating the forbidden fruit.
There is a vast gulf between "viable access to family formation" and "elite mansion with access to the most desirable partner". It isn't really arguable that modern society is failing to provide the former to a far larger portion of the population than it did in the past. The fact that "absolute living standards" means that we now have far more convenient and easy to use sports betting applications and larger flatscreen TVs doesn't really address the serious material concerns that a lot of people are facing.
At the same time, a lot of the visible concentrations of wealth in modern society are nakedly and undeniably antisocial. Take a look at some of President Trump's recent pardons - several of them have gone to people who defrauded the government or the greater populace. When people get angry at Joseph Schwartz, they're not envious that he's so much richer and better than him - they're furious that he cut costs in a way that lead to the death of their relatives while simultaneously avoiding paying tax. His wealth was explicitly gained in a way that harmed the rest of society, and yet our current system ensured he largely escaped consequences while the people who sued him and won in court received no compensation. While that's just one of the more prominent examples from recent news, you don't have to look particularly hard to find all sorts of examples of people profiting by dumping negative externalities on the public.
I agree, but this doesn't really have anything to do with inequality. Most of South America and Africa have vastly higher Gini indexes and much more blatant, corrupt wealth inequality than any developed country yet retain much higher TFR's, while the social democratic Nordic countries living under the law of Jante have amongst the lowest TFR's worldwide. Being rich, free & educated, having the optionality in life to do anything in life at the expense of having children, social atomization and access to smartphones seem like much more causal factors to plummeting rates of family formation.
I agree that a lot of the aesthetics of the modern wealthy are off-putting, but as I mentioned earlier, "powerful people act in upsetting ways" is not a solvable problem as long as the fundamental ability to concentrate power through technology exists at all. Nobody remembers the man that Luigi killed and nothing changed whatsoever. If it's not the current crop of people seizing the reins of power to enrich themselves, it'll simply be someone else stepping up in their stead.
My opinion is that the increased immigration flows and financial pressure on housing and cost of living have much more to do with the collapse in fertility rates than being free and educated. That said, the topic is so complicated that it could be a thread by itself - so I'll just say that I think the increase in relative costs of living is a direct result of policies solely pursued due to that inequality and that is what is decreasing fertility.
First of all, this is not just "the aesthetics" of the modern wealthy. What Schwartz did directly harmed society in exchange for personally enriching him, and this isn't some isolated case. Look through the list of pardons that Trump has handed out and you can see countless cases of this kind of banal and venal corruption. On top of that, look at people like Rick Scott, who defrauded the government and then used his ill-gotten wealth to get elected. There's no law of the universe which says that people need to put up with this odious nonsense, and this flagrant looting of the nation is prime tinder for a nasty political blowback. What kind of vision of the future are you offering when you say that things are going to be terrible forever and rich criminals will never face justice?
Moreover, the idea that this isn't a solvable problem is just completely false. Hell, all of those pardons could be fixed by the simple expedient of not allowing the president to pardon people in exchange for personal financial gain. It doesn't have to be like this and there are numerous governments throughout history and the world that have prevented this kind of behavior and stopped it.
Actually, the recent wave of warehouse burnings was directly inspired by his shooting.
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