From the technological Olympus of Silicon Valley to the urban canyons of Wall Street, a narrow club of vastly wealthy plutocrats sits on a ballooning share of the nation’s resources. One percent of Americans at the apex of the economy are hoarding over 31% of the nation’s total wealth, a cool $55tn in net worth.
Getting them to share with the rest of society, to fund redistribution or pay for public goods, is proving pretty much impossible. Their ability to move resources around, hide profit across jurisdictions, and minimize income to hoard wealth until they die appears to put them beyond the reach of taxation.
One recent research paper found that the country’s richest 384 oligarchs paid only 24% of their economic income in 2025, compared with 30% for the average taxpayer. And not all of them are getting top notch tax advice. Reporting by ProPublica revealed that some of the richest Americans – like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Michael Bloomberg – live largely tax free.
Here’s how it works: They pay no taxes because they own the government. So we pay taxes and give them our money.
Then they take our money and and use it to fund their terrible ideas that usually just fucking crash and burn and tank the entire fucking economy. So then they need more money. So you continue to pay more money, and they take your money. Now they have more money.
But we can’t ask them to contribute money to fund public services let alone their own harebrained schemes because “Something something… Milton Friedman… Blah, blah, blah Hayek and the road to Serfdom, and the CIA is busy defending our freedom, yada, yada, yada.”
To be fair, it’s not only the economy anymore. They’re literally ready to burn the planet and kill us all to get more money.
How the fuck are they gonna get more money if they kill us all?
Unless it’s just gonna be circular financing from now on, with the rich snowballing their monopoly money back and forth.
Their net worths are already made up anyway. It’s all merely speculative. Once we’re all gone, who’s going to be left to remind them that those numbers don’t mean anything?
It’ll be the same circular lending schemes, only instead of self-fellating about becoming trillionaires, they’ll be self-fellating about becoming quadrillionaires. And so on…
They’re like children playing imagination, arguing over whose stick is really “the most powerful sword in the game.” The adults have left the room.
Affluence is a mental illness.
Just a reminder that Hayek and his mob were opposed to the application of the scientific method to economics, and also that the only place any of them had any experience of actual governance was in the proto-fascist pre-Anschluss government of Austria, where their proposed policies failed.