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7 Reddit comments about Oligarchy:

u/[deleted] · 6 pointsr/news

Read this [factual book] (http://www.amazon.com/Oligarchy-Jeffrey-A-Winters/dp/0521182980) and you'll see the research shows that the break down isn't until you get to the very top. The top 400 wealthiest Americans pay a much, much smaller percent in taxes then the bracket immediately below them.

This is the biggest issues with the "99%", the top 1% still includes lots of people that still are nowhere near 'oligarch' status: doctors, small business owners, CEOs of small-midsized companies, etc. People at this level certainly life more comfortably then most, but they don't have the capital to bend legal and political apparatuses to their will when necessary. They don't have dramatically more say in how the country is run, or how other live their lives. And most important people at this level do pay a fair amount of taxes.

The problem is at the very, very top there are people who have absurd capital even if you assume wealth should be distributed according to a power law. The issue is that a.) people don't really understand enough math to realize how screwed up the system is and b.) our oligarchs are the most PR savvy the world has seen. Russian oligarchs tend to not fear being perceived as ruthless, power hungry, owners of Russian. American oligarchs are much more clever. If you claim that perhaps Gates, Musk, Buffet, and even Soros might be oligarchs you are immediately dismissed as being jealous of such wonderful people!

u/UnboughtStuffedDogs · 3 pointsr/changemyview

One way to measure societal health is through the level of inequality, usually quantified through the Gini coefficient. In general, societies that have a very wide inequality gap seem to develop sociological pathologies that are bad for both those who have amassed a measure of wealth, and those who have not. For instance, the haves become increasingly afraid that the have nots are going to kick in the gates of their suburbs and mess with their stereo knobs and then burn the place down. They come to see themselves as a rightful superior ruling class and infer that their position of power and privilege is 'the natural order of things' instead of the result of a great many variables and historical power dynamics, accident of birth, etc.

As the wealthy have the means to organize and hire professional help to push their share of the taxation burden downmarket, this increases the burden on the less wealthy, and as socially constructed services begin to decline, the wealthy end up spending a far far greater % of their personal income hiring private services that do the same thing, individually, and this atomized pricing costs all of the wealthy a great deal more in aggregate. Since the wealthy are most likely paying those with far less to provide these services, and they are already worried about 'the barbarians at the gates' so to speak, they end up with money and power and a near total fear of everyone outside their economic class, therefore ending up in gilded prisons of their own creation, all the while paranoid that their nannies are robbing them and their security forces are just waiting for the chance to sell them out to the highest bidder.

As for the have nots, as these basic services decay and they lose easy access to healthcare, vacation time, decent workplace treatment and safeguards, they begin to morph into a permanent underclass, and since all of the money and power is being concentrated into fewer hands, a form of neofeudalism or serfdom develops where 'meritocracy' becomes replaced with 'catering to the manners, whims, fashions, and fleeting desires of the upper class' which means that their skillsets and livelihoods are constantly under threat, after all, if you make really nice Large Hats for Rich Women, and then hats go out of vogue, you just got 'made redundant' and will need to find a new way to derive an income by pleasing the people where all that potential income resides.

As the have nots get priced out of markets for things necessary to human life (clean water, food that does not blow out your insulin regulation system and kill you in 20 years time, healthcare) by the inflationary nature of the ultra wealthy bidding up the prices of these services with their discretionary income, they come to see the wealthier members of society as living in a safe bubble of stability that they could only dream of, and I don't mean dreaming of sports cars and caviar, I mean dreams of 'wow, it must be nice to know that if you need your wisdom teeth pulled, or you get a week long cold, you aren't going to get charged more than you make in a month for medical care while simultaneously losing your job for missing a few days in a flexible labor economy where some other barely surviving person will jump at the chance to replace you.'

This sort of instability for hierarchy of needs things, and social standing things make people lose their minds and consider extreme actions just to survive day to day which creates even more net losses for society; it is way easier to be criminally indifferent to other people when you are certain that society at large couldn't give a shit if you and yours life with dignity or die in a gutter. In essence, the rich enclose themselves and become further isolated from the experiences of their less prestigious fellow citizens, and the not rich get ground underfoot while a huge ocean of resentment builds up at watching the comparatively carefree and decadent sphere the comfortable move in (try and avoid watching the court dramas of the well heeled in any modern society, and see how it goes for you when you go to the grocery store or look at any glowing screen).

Also, it is very likely that the merely wealthy are being predated upon far more by the extremely wealthy than the poor when it comes to their taxation burden, as the extremely wealthy enlist elite services to push their potential tax burden down on to them; the guy with a million in assets (half of which are probably a residence) goes to H&R block and they find you some tax breaks, while the oligarch drops 7 figures on a tax opinion letter from a white shoe firm that explains to the government how all of their tax dodges are perfectly legal. Subsidizing the costs of living for the entire society and ensuring that no one falls into privation and misery most likely has a smaller price tag than the losses to societies from the tax dodging of the super elite, much less the cost of the negative externalizes that develop in a regressive taxation regime where those with the most have the most deploy-able tools to pay the least.

This does not speak to the actions of government when it comes to decisions about how taxes are spent, nor the way that currency is created in the modern financial world, nor the merits of productive vs unproductive asset accumulation and occupations, nor to corporate welfare subsidies, nor the question of if markets exist without government and vice versa. Only that in a society where basic needs are met for everyone without all of the poor-punching, everyone will generally be happier, have more of what they need and less of what they don't, and have a greater standard of living and mental health, even if nominally the well off have a lower number left in their accounts at the end of the day.

Also, you shouldn't have to work as hard as you to do get by or be comfortable. No one should, we have gone through an automation and productivity boom the likes of which the world has never seen in the past 40 years or so, however the fruits of that boom have been distributed in a manner that belongs buried in the 1600's. I am sure some of these ideas will be considered fairly radical by some or most.

Some sources relating to the formation of this opinion https://rwer.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/the-plutonomy-reports/ (blog post because the actual internal reports have gotten harder and harder to find online)
http://www.amazon.com/Oligarchy-Jeffrey-A-Winters/dp/0521182980/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1375142202&sr=8-1&keywords=oligarchy Marvelous book when it comes to understanding the world we live in presently
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
There are others, but I don't have links readily available.

EDIT: Semi Serious paragraphs. (which then made the formatting even worse, which I hope I fixed in edit 2 )

u/depleater · 3 pointsr/politics

Thanks for the response. For anyone reading, the books thenamestiki referenced (which both look worth a read):

  • Oligarchy (Jeffrey Winters)
  • The Enduring Debate (Canon, Coleman, Mayer)

    If you can explicitly identify the Princeton-or-Harvard study you mentioned, I'd also be interested in having a look at that.
u/jacobsimon818 · 2 pointsr/ask

In fact, judging by the summaries of those two books I would recommend to you, Winner Take All Politics and Oligarchy

u/Neospector · 2 pointsr/news

> It's a view defended by Princeton political scientists

It is not.

/u/LouDorchen should listen to this too because I'll cover both of your points.

"US is an oligarchy, not a democracy" is the title given to it by the BBC blog section, "Echo Chambers" (subtitled, "Blogging global opinion, clearly"). The actual title of the study is "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens", and "oligarchy" is only mentioned three times in the entire text, and only as a comparison made by Jeffrey Winters in his book, Oligarchy:

> Most recently, Jeffrey Winters has posited a comparative theory of “Oligarchy,” in which the wealthiest citizens—even in a “civil oligarchy” like the United States—dominate policy concerning crucial issues of wealth and income protection.^1

As I replied here, a bad system is not an "oligarchy", and calling it an "oligarchy", as in, "we're screwed because the rich rule" is what's being edgy.

Source:

Cambridge link cited by the BBC article

Full study text

"Oligarchy" by Jeffrey Winters on Amazon

u/goodschiff · 1 pointr/Kossacks_for_Sanders

As Jeff Winters says in his book "Oligarchy" oligarchs are interested in the preservation of their wealth. One kind of threat to them is other oligarchs, another is masses of people, another is government that wants to take away their wealth.

As Bernie Sanders said, sitting behind Trump at the inauguration were billionaire after billionaire after billionaire. One most prominent is Sheldon Adelson who will be "directing" Trump's middle east policy. Rebecca Mercer and the Koch brothers are three behind-the-scenes oligarchs pulling the strings. Mercer is particularly involved in picking cabinet members. Look them up. And, yes, there were/are many oligarchs behind Hillary.

For a nuanced explanation analysis of oligarchy try Winters' book:

https://www.amazon.com/Oligarchy-Jeffrey-Winters/dp/0521182980

Or go to Cambridge Univ press, if you don't want to use Amazon.