However, this isn’t where I think the heart of the problem is located. Most of the graphs you pick up show a pretty significant spike in inequality and capture when you start getting into the 1% or .01%. And this is where you see people making private, bottle-service public policy – that is, policy that has almost no public benefit other than to make society work well for the wealthy. Claiming tax deductions for private jets when so many people can’t afford daycare is an example of a rigged system. What I was interested in exploring in Winners Take All is the way in which elites at the very top use the conquest of language, of culture and of our common sense to cement their role and social position
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I think philanthropy is a Band-Aid on a bleeding tumor. To be sure, there’s blood, and the Band-Aid helps with that. But the Band-Aid is inadequate to the underlying problem. To stretch the metaphor further: the Band-Aid may give you a false sense of confidence that the problem is being handled. In an age of extraordinary generosity from plutocrats, we are at risk of forgetting that the same class of people are also undermining the greater good every day and on an ongoing basis.
The problem with philanthropy is that it depends on and trusts the voluntarism of the people with the most to lose from change to be our changemakers. I don’t think philanthropists are all horrible people. This is not about individual morality. That is hardly the point. This is about whom you trust to play a leadership role in deciding what the common good is, what our policy priorities should be, and how we make the world better.
In so many ways, we have outsourced the betterment of our world to people with a vested interest in making sure we don’t make it too, too much better. I’m going to give an example that may sound extreme to some people: what we often do today would be analogous to if we had gone around to plantation owners in Alabama in the 1800s and asked them to lead organizations advancing racial justice. It’s impossible. They can’t be the ones to do it.
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The second piece of the answer is that we should be solving way fewer of these problems through philanthropic giving in the first place. We should be living in a world in which people can’t make as much money as they do right now and profit to a cruel degree on the labor of poor people, mostly black and brown, and then turn around and be able to throw coin at them. This type of change is only achievable through policy. So when Elizabeth Warren proposes a wealth tax in part to fund universal childcare, her motivation is to achieve broad-based justice for many people without putting the ruling class in a leadership position.
And if the ruling class doesn’t like it, they are free to choose any country on earth that offers them a better deal. I am a patriot. I don’t think they’re going to go anywhere. All these billionaires who threaten to take the next plane to Singapore if we tax their 10 millionth dollar at 70% or we take 2% of their wealth in a wealth tax – I think they’re all bluffing and I’m willing to play poker with any one of them.
https://www.theguardian.c(...)iew-winners-take-all