politico | But let’s speak frankly to each other. I’m not the smartest guy
you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m
not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I
think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen
in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of
entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?
I see pitchforks.
At the same time that people like you
and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the
rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind. The divide
between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In
1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.
But
the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic
to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that
inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day.
Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a
feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle
class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France.
Before the revolution.
And so I have a message for my fellow
filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up,
people. It won’t last.
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. You show me a highly
unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising.
There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.
