Drake (@drakekoefoed)

@ValerieCurren some wealth inequality is a fact of life but most of it results from deliberate policies. those policies are anti meritocracy, from the power of the pharaohs to bezos. high merit people are not the ones who want to be billionaires. for instance, the guy who discovered insulin gave it away (but the capitalists found a way to monopolize it and charge 100 prices for it anyway) great fortunes of course all derive from great crimes. usa started with genocide, and then the landless cowboys built the great ranches without a share in them. I am not saying you should not be able to leave your house in suburbia to your kids. but if you can leave them a billion, they will never work, and you can forget the meritocracy because the high merit people will never get to try. government should care for its citizens such that we all receive help from it. and so sure, let the gov have some of my stuff when i go. had we had a system where young people could get land to put to work, i would be a wholesale nurseryman today but at 67 beginning to hand the whole thing over to a worker co-op so the people who worked with me would carry on. sure, let my nephew have some bonds from the co-op but he doesn't need it all. Your description of crony capitalism is masterful. I need add nothing to it. going on from there, my question is, how do you prevent this? is it not the inevitable consequence of industrial capitalism? I believe it is, so one thing i think we should do is democratically control state run power grid, highway and rail networks, and that sort of major stuff that will be run by an unelected bureaucracy if we don't put an elected bureaucracy in charge of it. the public is going to pay for it, so we may as well keep the profit.