Wealth transfers never never goes the other way either. Not without guillotines or maybe for a bit after WWII when we had a united country with rich people grateful to all the dead young commoners.
Or at least grateful enough not to try to actively hoard every dollar of the booming economy for themselves.
Teddy? Trust busting and real antitrust?
There can be wealth transfers without guillotines. In the USA we went from the extreme wealth inequality of the gilded age to something better after WW2. The labor movement and unions and every day people achieved that. It was not the gratefulness of the rich. During that time period almost all of the killing and violence came from the ruling class directed onto the working class.
People talk about the labor movement from the 20s and 30s, but there were big strikes during the war, immediately after the war and in the 50s too.
https://www.americanhistoryusa.com/postwar-strike-wave-1945-46/
UAW struck for 113 days in 1946 - 320k workers, general strike in Oakland, 350k coal miner strike
Getting racist non-college whites back into unions seems to be the only hope for this country. But it feels like that ship has sailed.
Republicans took away their unions, laughed in the workersâ faces as they were doing it, and the racists couldnât possibly love them more for it. Seems so hopeless.
BUT $700/YEAR UNION DUES
The beginning of the descent(from itâs peak âpowerâ) of the American working class began in part with the passing of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. It outlawed different kinds of strikes, the ones that were most effective, and opened the door to âright to workâ laws.
And that guy in the union who is lazy and does nothing at work!
Can there be wealth transfers without a catalyst as traumatic as the Depression and/or WW2? If not, then is Trump+COVID enough to spur action? If not, then what do we have to do to create that response?
Hopefully nothing, all of those events were awful.
I prefer being realistic to being hopeful.
There was no obvious catalyst when LBJ got Medicare done. It can happen.
I would think the Capitol riots and BLM protests have given at least a few rich people pause. If the hard right and the hard left wants to chop your head off - thatâs a little scary. Maybe not enough to make a difference but who knows.
We could abolish debt with nothing more than keyboard strokes. That would be a huge wealth transfer from the rich to the poor.
Collapsing the economy would be bad for the proles. People no longer paying their mortgage debt was an important contributor to the 08 recession.
The catalyst was LBJ. He pushed people around and bullied. Its an effective way to get things done.
Debt and the payments in service to it are a wealth transfer from the proles to the wealthy. Canceling debt ends that transfer.
That capitalism took a shit like it does every 5-10 years in 2008, and as one of the consequences people caught at the bottom of the pyramid of a real estate bubble lost their homes, seems more like argument in favor of cancelling the debts rather than letting them re-inflate until the next financial âcrisisâ.
And then the money goes back to the middle class in the form of wages, nice places to live and home values. Your model of the world as the rich vaccuming money from the middle class is flawed.
It sounds to me like youâre simultaneously describing how trickle down economics works, and then saying itâs a good thing.
My model of the world operates with the understanding that the rich are extracting/vacuuming from the non-rich because thatâs exactly what our economic system is designed to do.
Capital is mobile. Labor is a global market. Economics is fundamentally different from the union era.