Author Topic: Welcome to the end of democracy  (Read 84 times)

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rangerrebew

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Welcome to the end of democracy
« on: January 20, 2022, 06:00:39 pm »
Welcome to the end of democracy
A rising tide of money and administrative power defines the rising autocracy
8 January 2022, 2:00am
 
 
We bemoan autocracies in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Russia and China but largely ignore the more subtle authoritarian trend in the West. Don’t expect a crudely effective dictatorship out of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: we may remain, as we are now, nominally democratic, but be ruled by a technocratic class empowered by greater powers of surveillance than those enjoyed by even the nosiest of dictatorships.

The new autocracy rises from a relentless economic concentration which has engendered a new and fabulously wealthy elite. Five years ago, around four hundred billionaires owned as much as half of the world’s assets. Today, only one hundred billionaires own that share, and Oxfam reduces that number to a mere twenty-six. In avowedly socialist China, the top one per cent of the population holds about one-third of the country’s wealth, up from 20 per cent two decades ago. Since 1978, China’s Gini coefficient, which measures inequality of wealth distribution, has tripled.

An OECD report issued before the Covid pandemic finds that almost everywhere, the non-rich share of national wealth has declined. These trends can be seen even in social democracies like Sweden and Germany. In the United States, as the conservative economist John Michaelson put it succinctly in 2018, the economic legacy of the last decade is 'excessive corporate consolidation, a massive transfer of wealth to the top one per cent from the middle class.'

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/welcome-to-the-end-of-democracy

Offline Kamaji

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Re: Welcome to the end of democracy
« Reply #1 on: January 20, 2022, 06:07:03 pm »
Want to cut the new billionaires down to size?  Reduce the time for protection of IP rights.  Make patents expire in 10 years - they currently last 20 in the U.S. - and make copyrights expire in 10 years as well - they currently last 70 years.

Copyright, in particular, applies to software, so that really locks in a development.

Finally, enforce antitrust much more aggressively.  Facebook/Meta, Google/Alphabet, Amazon, etc, all need to be broken up, for the health of the free-market economy.