Hubris: Excessive pride, self confidence
“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.”
America is at one of those lull before the storm moments. Inequality of income and wealth is at an all time high. The very wealthy are doing extremely well. “The fastest growing demographic group in America is not seniors, it’s not Latins, it’s billionaires. We had 500 billionaires ten years ago, we now have 2500.” (Scott Galloway) While the top 1% of income earners has seen their share of total income rise to the highest levels in history, middle class incomes have failed to keep up over the past forty years.
The top 20% of Americans by income has seen their share of wealth increase the most between 1990 and 2022. In the final quarter of 2022, this group held 71% of the nation’s wealth–up from 61% in 1960. The highest-earning 1% of Americans drove this growth: at the end of 2022 their share of the country’s wealth grew to 26% from 17% in 1990–nine percentage points. The share of all other groups declined especially at the lowest end of the scale.
Tax laws take “care of the super wealthy” and the “current tax codes continue to help the very wealthy in a way that is designed to … screw the middle class and continue to transfer more money to the super wealthy … NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, whose net worth is reported to be $130 billion, is now worth more than Boeing. I mean, something is wrong here. The new oligarchs of America have weaponized the government, and we risk revolution. Whether it’s CEO’s being murdered in the street, whether it’s a MeToo movement that had righteous components of it, or Black Lives Matter. What are these movements? They are targeting the very wealthy … We are in the midst of a series of small revolutions to correct income inequality. And the reason we put an insurrectionist and a rapist in office is because, for the first time in our nation’s history, a 30-year-old man or woman isn’t doing as well as his or her parents were at thirty. Why? Because the majority of households are having the oxygen sucked out of the room so that a small number of individuals and a small number of companies can be worth more than nation-states.” (Galloway)
Revolutions can be disruptive and dangerous and maybe even feel good but they fail to change the circumstances of the very rich. As the saying goes, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, maybe with a few bumps along the way. We can tolerate a certain amount of inequality but not an excessive amount. What holds capitalism and democracy and ultimately America together is a strong middle class and the optimism that the system is not rigged against the average citizen. “The good news is” that the “level of income inequality is usually self-correcting. The bad news is the means of self-correction are typically war, famine, or revolution.” (Galloway)
The rich oligarchs today have their own currency with crypto so they can blissfully ignore government laws, avoid taxes, and engage in illegal activities without consequences if they choose to do so. The so-called free enterprise capitalist system has been captured by monopolies that now control the sale and distribution of almost everything we buy. It started with credit cards that allowed banks to capture 3% or more from every purchase. Now large tech companies skim the cream off the top of everything from books to music and soup to nuts. With the emergence of AI the major tech companies can control information and make up whatever facts they want. And we fools believe them. No wonder social media companies are giving up on fact checking, they have become the only facts that matter.
We are about to enter a four year stretch when, in the immortal words of William Butler Yeats:
There will be blood. The question is who’s? I’m not counting on the oligarchs bleeding out. Democracy is more likely to be the ultimate loser. But one never knows. Hope springs eternal and maybe, just maybe, the oligarchs will get their comeuppance some fine day. Lest our new Supreme Leader and his motley crew of wealthy sychophants end up like poor Danny Dravot in Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, I warn them beware hubris, the first and most important of the seven deadly sins. Come back to earth ye mighty Icaruses and give the rest of us our chance to wish upon a star before the apocalypse comes to pass.