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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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Does anyone have any good ideas for how the USA could implement this without causing too much economic harm?

The primary problem of trillionaires and megabillionaires existing is not a matter of consumption. It's not physically possible for a small number of extremely rich guys to negatively impact the living standards of the general public via their personal consumption, no matter how extravagant, and the consequence of trying to liquidate and redistribute all that wealth would mostly be drive consumer prices up.

The actual problem is the way in which the concentration of wealth and purchasing power allow ultra-wealthy individuals to wield outsized political influence, silence critics, and corrupt institutions. Musk essentially bought himself a cabinet post, bullied the Nasdaq into changing their rules for him, and purchased twitter for the purpose of making it into a right-wing propaganda platform. More broadly, we've seen a ton of quid-pro-quo dealings between the Trump administration and private businesses (not that there were no problems with this before, but the 2nd Trump administration has been extraordinarily bad and blatant about it). This is how extreme wealth concentration harms the welfare of the general public - by utilizing existing financial leverage to further rent-seek at the expense of the general public, either in a direct monetary fashion or by sabotaging pro-social policy for personal benefit. And since corruption tends to be self-perpetuating, this can be a very hard cycle to break.

The problem is that the US legal system doesn't really have a way of separating the personal consumption of very wealthy individuals from political activism, and current precedent recognizes spending money as a form of speech. You can't really pass a law saying you're not allowed to own a news company or social media platform if you're sufficiently rich.

and purchased twitter for the purpose of making it into a right-wing propaganda platform

I'll never forget the best quip I ever heard about the sale: who knew the 70% completed Death Star was for sale?

It was turned into a right-wing propaganda platform from a left-wing propaganda platform. It was always propaganda, and whichever spook was supposed to be handling Jack Dorsey really fucked up.

The things that are happening in this administration are in response to and escalations from what happened int he Biden administration, and what he learned from the first administration. All of this could have been avoided, except for the propaganda that insisted on portraying Trump as uniquely evil, uniquely corrupt, uniquely threatening to democracy. What's the penalty for being late? Death. What's the penalty for treason? Also death. So might as well go for treason if you're already late. There was never any backing down for Trump, because his opponents are not reasonable, and will hang him for being late.