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| Economy |
| Where Did All Those 'Capitalist Pigs' Go? |
| 2021-05-07 |
| [Townhall] ...According to Forbes's 35th annual ranking of billionaires, last year witnessed a population explosion. Some 660 new billionaires were added to the number for a total of 2,755. And more than one in every four billionaires is an American. ..."The United States had the most billionaires, at 724, extending a rapid rise in wealth that hasn't happened since the Rockefellers and the Carnegies roughly a century ago. China, including Macau and Hong Kong, had the second highest number of billionaires: 698." This tripling of the wealth of the world's billionaires and 30% increase in their number came during a year when America and the West endured the worst pandemic in a century and worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. "While most of the world's wealthiest people prospered during the pandemic, thanks in part to stock prices," writes the Post, "millions of Americans grappled with job loss, food insecurity, debt, eviction and poverty." Query: Where was the outrage? In previous times like these, where the rich got richer and the poor and working class rode the rails, we would have heard the excoriations of economic populists and echoes of TR's "malefactors of great wealth" and FDR's "forces of entrenched greed." But Forbes' report of the population explosion among billionaires in 2020 passed seemingly without protest. The dogs did not bark. Why not? ...today's billionaires' boys club has come to understand how to make its astonishing wealth acceptable, by ingratiating themselves with their old ideological enemies. Set up a tax-exempt foundation, fund it with billions of dollars, invite in liberals to sit on the board, and, at munificent salaries, to run it and distribute its income to liberal causes. The way to diminish leftist resentment at huge piles of private wealth is to give them a cut. ...Yet, of greater interest, and import, is that the China of the new Great Helmsman, Xi Jinping, a one-party Communist dictatorship, coexists with hundreds of Chinese billionaires. ...One wonders: Has China found the formula for global ascendancy that eluded the Soviet Union of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev? Use state capitalism and market incentives to build the economic wealth that can be translated into the growth to enable China to ascend to a level of power where it is indisputably the first nation on earth? Are the Chinese billionaires the geese laying the golden eggs for the Chinese Communist party? Is Communist doctrine being updated to accommodate the most successful Communist country of them all? |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |