"Zillionaire" Nick Hanauer warns of coming revolution
Nick Hanauer, internet entrepreneur, has a message for his fellow “zillionaires”: the revolution is coming.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html#ixzz368C0EBHD
Mr Hanauer, an early investor in internet retail giant Amazon, says like many of his fellow one-percenters, he owns his own yacht, multiple homes and private jet. He says he acquired all his wealth by seeing the potential of the internet and acting on it.
Now, he writes in Politico magazine, he sees a different kind of future, and the outlook for people like him is not a bright one:
If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out.
Do you think the US is special or different, he asks. You’re wrong. No nation is immune, he says - just ask the Russian tsars or the French aristocracy.
Things are going to change, he says, and when they do it will happen quickly - but it doesn’t have to be this way.
Mr Hanauer endorses what he calls “middle-out” economics. He advocates raising the minimum wage and endorses Seattle’s recent move to raise the lowest hourly wage for an employee in the city jurisdiction to $15 (£8.80).
By paying Americans a “living wage”, he writes, it will relieve some of the burden on the federal government to provide programs like food stamps, rent assistance and medical-care subsidies. That will help conservatives get their wish of trimming government spending.
He concludes that while the public is starting to view the capitalist system as broken, it can still work as long as it is regulated.
"It can be managed either to benefit the few in the near term or the many in the long term," he writes. "The work of democracies is to bend it to the latter."
Rick Newman of Yahoo Finance thinks Mr Hanauer is getting a bit too worked up, however.
"The rich ought to chill out," he writes. "While the masses may envy their wealth, there’s no evidence of a revolution brewing, or even a well-behaved civil disturbance."
He agrees that Mr Hanauer has identified some disturbing trends and that steps should be taken to address income inequality.
"It’s nearly inevitable there will be government spending cuts and, yes, tax hikes, when the government’s finances become unsustainable, which could take a decade or more," he says. "When it happens, the politicians in Washington will find ways to spread the pain around, and America will muddle through."
Pitchforks or muddling. It seems these are the choices.
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