Yay Billionaires
“Woo woo woo” they went. “my country has the most billionaires. We win”
“Hurrah. The US of A wins again.”
Reality check people : Living in a country with lots of billionaires doesn’t increase the chances of you becoming one of them.
If you want to live in a country that gives you the best chance of becoming wealthy, you need to live in one that has healthy levels of social spending… countries that invest in education, health and the welfare of their citizens generally.
If you live in Scandanavia, you have a 100% better chance of becoming wealthy than if you live in US.
I feel sorry for US people in some ways. So many people will spend a large part of their lives paying for some billionaires yacht (working the longest hours in the west) and throughout, being one serious illness away from bankrupcy. Their children won’t inherit their house, because they’ll need to borrow against it to pay for their health-care at the end of their lives, because everything’s privatised. Yay billionaires.
People emmigrated from Europe to the US, to get away from chronically unfair social conditions… that they’ve now recreated in the new country to such a severe extent that many people would now be better off if they just went home again.
US policy doesn’t seem to be discussed in terms of empirical evidence or results. Instead it’s endless arguing over the merits of a (limited; prescribed) set of Magic-Formulas, each with their own unassailable systems of internal logic. When the formulas fail (and they do), the answer always seems to be “we aren’t applying them rigourously enough”.
So the answer to failing drug law is “zero-tolerance”, the answer to an intractible military fuckup is a troop-surge, the answer to chronic teenage pregnancy is “more abstinence education”, the answer to an economy destroyed by unregulated corporations is “less regulation”, the answer to a chronic gun crime problem is “more guns”. Tthe reason Bush is a disaster is that he isn’t conservative enough, not because conservative policies always fail.
Everywhere something is fucking up, someone is getting rich and a large proportion of the victims have been conditioned to “believe” that the best way out is to do even more of the thing that’s causing the fuck up. They argue for it tooth and nail. They see it as some sort of moral imperative.
Congratulations, you now have a ruling class.
