The billionaire class in America adopted a harmful form of politcal & economic activity which the Father of Capitalism warned us about. It is called plutocracy and we need to end it once and for all.
As I wrote in Adam Smith & the Origin of Capitalism, most of what I assumed to be foundational capitalist principles were actually modern American alterations. The Father of Capitalism actually endorsed taxation and a progressive tax system as well as some economic regulation like using government to prevent market monopolization and to level out the negotiating table between labor and capital. Adam Smith called the economic elite the Masters of Mankind and labeled them vile for their endless, insatiable greed. He warned not to worship the economic elite because more often than not their wealth was acquired through ill-gotten means and corrupt business practices. Perhaps most importantly, the father of capitalism advocated for the Labor Theory of Value and described labor as the most vital aspect of an economy. All of those values have been abandoned by the Billionaires and Wall Street capitalists of today who instead embody the vile maxim that the father of capitalism opposed;
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”
―Adam Smith
Smith argued that the masters of mankind have used governments throughout history to maximize their own power and control over society, especially by dictating to workers the conditions and compensation of labor while violently putting down dissent. Worker uprisings were commonly extinguished using government militias and that same violence also came from private mercenaries in the United States. That can even be seen in recent American history like the Ludlow Massacre where the Rockefeller family hired mercenaries aided by the Colorado National Guard to murder striking coal miners. There are dozens of examples like that resulting from over a century of Labor Wars in America between workers and the elites detailed in this PBS article;
Smith instead argued that government should mainly seek to provide structure to the economic system while maximizing individual liberty. Instead of directing the winners and losers in the economy or aiding the elites in maintaining their power, the market should decide who succeeds or fails based on economic forces. If a business is efficient at providing a good or service people actually want, it should succeed because people choose to be their customers. If a business is bad at it, the business should fail which then makes room for a better business to take its place. Businesses are also competing for laborers to do the work so they must make their jobs appealing to the workers. The father of capitalism said that workers should be able to negotiate their terms of labor freely with minimal coercion or interference from governments or the masters of mankind. When the interests of labor and capital inevitably conflict, government should favor the interests of the laborers over those of the economic elites. Smith insinuated that government should serve as an invisible hand using laws and regulations to guide economic activity to be in the benefit of society while outlawing harmful forms of money-getting.
America finally began to adopt those values in a Labor Movement starting around the time of the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln recognized the totally unjust economic reality America inherited which shaped the very structure of our society when he said;
“It has so happened, in all ages of the world, that some have labored, and others have without labor enjoyed a large portion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, is a worthy object of any good government.”
―Abraham Lincoln,
The disdain for the greed of the elites continued boiling for a few more decades due to rampant widespread poverty while the elites enjoyed extreme luxury and tremendous wealth. A next big step for the Labor Movement came when Theodore Roosevelt came out with his speech called New Nationalism which advocated for a new Economic reality to be created using government to represent the interests of the working-class. He then began an era of trust-busting breaking up monopolistic corporations and advocating for unionization of the working class.
“I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity”
In Theodore Roosevelt’s speech called New Nationalism, he explained that he was representing a decades-long labor movement in the United States pioneered by Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln had described that struggle like this;
The New Deal passed under the FDR administration further made Theodore Roosevelt’s economic vision a reality by establishing rules like a minimum wage, maximum work-week, and Social Security. Those rules vastly raised the average American’s quality of life and drastically reduced poverty in America. But they also expanded government’s power and reduced the overall share of the economy that the elites took. The elites hated that system and invested heavily in fighting back; probably even contributing to the assassination of 3 prominent Labor Leaders MLK Jr., JFK, and RFK, as well as many others all in a single decade. After their assassinations, the Labor Movement was left in disarray and the economic elites proceeded to dominate the labor wars through mass propaganda. The elites used their media minions to spread fake narratives about government being the enemy of the people and promoting culture war battles to distract from class warfare. Decades of that relentless propaganda convinced much of the working-class that the elites are on their side while the Labor Movement’s pro-government ideology is the real enemy. The elites won the last 50 years of class warfare by tricking the working class into not even fighting back. So now we’ve lived under a half century regression away from the progress the Labor Movement created and huge swathes of the working-class have been deceived into supporting the interests of the economic elites.
We now live in the exact economic system the father of capitalism warned us about; one ruled by the economic elite for the economic elite. That type of system where government authority is given to the ultra-rich to represent their own interests is called a plutocracy. After decades of the elites slowly taking back power in America, Donald Trump’s Presidency finally solidified America’s total descent into Plutocracy. Trump’s inauguration itself was proof of that reality as it was packed with the billionaires who’ve bought into his administration including;
“tech leaders…Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg; Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook; Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai; Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos;and Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk”
Trump’s Israel First foreign policy? Miriam Adelson bought that! Trump’s destruction of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? Musk bought that! Trump’s gutting of the Federal Trade Commission’s crackdown on market monopolization? Billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos funded the cause. And what about Trump’s gutting of the National Labor Relations Board? Well, Musk and Bezos have been fighting the NLRB for years trying to dismantle it because it is starting to crackdown on their illegal anti-union activities. While Trump is kicking a few dozen trans athletes off their teams, the billionaires are taking away your right to unionize. While Elon Musk and the Republicans go around complaining about DEI and focusing the narrative on culture war issues, they are simultaneously gutting government watchdogs on their economic activity at the expense of ordinary Americans. Krystal Ball of
has been doing an incredible job covering the Trump presidency and I highly suggest making her commentary a regular part of your media intake.
If you’re on track to make less than 10 million dollars over your 50 year working career, Donald Trump does not represent your interests. Trump’s Plutocrats make millions per hour every hour all year long, even when they’re sleeping. Still, they want more and they want it to come at the expense of the working class. Trump’s Presidency is class warfare disguised as a culture war and the elites are laughing at us.
The average salary in 2024 for a full-time worker in America was around 60 thousand per year. Most people work for about 50 years of their career (20s-70ish). If you made an average of 60k per year for a 50 year career, your entire life's earnings would be about 3 million dollars. If you made 100k annually on average over a 50 year working career it wou…
The richest man in the world, Elon Musk spent over a quarter of a billion dollars to get Donald Trump elected and now he is taking an axe to the government regulators overseeing his businesses. He is trying to end public welfare spending while simultaneously preventing workers from engaging in unionization. Corporations are trying to hold unions financially responsible for loss of revenue resulting from strikes, thereby making strikes not only ineffective but actively harmful to the workers. Musk has more money than probably any human in history, but he wants more and he wants it to come from a desperate workforce deprived of their right to collectively bargain for better wages or working conditions. Does he care about the harm he causes? No, because as Krystal Ball describes here,
Musk believes in a vision of making humanity interplanetary, and he is also an egomaniac who thinks the ends justify the means. It doesn’t matter who he harms or how much he harms them as long as it serves his vision and if you disagree he acts like you’re just not smart enough to be on his level. Even worse, Musk bought into this fundamentalist ideology where the economic elites should rule everything. Corporations are little autocracies and the business elites want to extend that type of control far beyond their business onto the rest of society as a whole. Rather than government power being used as a check on the economic elites, the elites want to use government power as a check on the citizens. They don’t want to end tyranny, they want to be the tyrants.
The Trump Presidency represents the rule of the economic elites and there will be negative consequences for the working class throughout the next few years. Solving this problem will take years, but right now we need to raise basic awareness of class warfare in America. There needs to be a cultural reckoning and an economic renaissance where the American people take back our government from the Plutocrats. This is a long-term issue and we need to stop putting band-aids on an increasingly unhealthy economic system. We need a radical political and economic revolution to usher in a new era of widely distributed wealth instead of extreme wealth concentration. We need to put an end to the reign of the economic elites and make sure they can't take over our government again.
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I plan to write about exactly what that revolution will entail and the economic reality America could and should create in the future. Check out my previous economics posts here;
