The Plutocrats of Wall Street and Silicon Valley Are Scamming America
In recent years, it seems that the nation’s CEOs and billionaires are increasingly willing to drop the pretense that they are politically neutral entrepreneurs who simply want to go about their business.
Last week, for example, more than a hundred CEOs met to plot ways to punish the people of Georgia by “stopping investments in states” that pass laws unapproved by the billionaire class.
This comes in the wake of a decision by Major League Baseball—a collection of billionaire-owned sports teams—to punish residents of Georgia for the fact a tiny number of politicians there passed legislation designed to lessen voter fraud. In retaliation, MLB decided to move the league’s all-star game so as to deny the residents of Atlanta the economic benefits of hosting the game.
This comes only a few years after Apple CEO Tim Cook led a corporate campaign to boycott Indiana after Cook and Marc Benioff (the CEO of Salesforce) demanded the people of Indiana be punished. This was because the Indiana legislature passed a law which some billionaires decided was insufficiently pro-LGBT.
These examples, however, constitute only a small and relatively innocuous part of the political scheming and lobbying in which powerful CEOs, billionaires, and investors routinely engage.
Certainly, wealthy CEOs are happy to throw their weight around in pursuit of social policies they like. But while the CEOs’ calls for boycotts and retribution against entire populations of various states makes for good headlines and talk radio, the billionaire class inflicts far more damage on ordinary Americans through other means.
It is not unusual to find large corporate interests like big banks, Silicon Valley firms, and Wall Street investors calling for a wide variety of policies which transfer wealth from the general public to the well-lined pockets of the monied classes. These can include monetary policies that benefit the wealthiest Americans, as well as tax policies and regulations that favor large well-established firms at the expense of everyone else.
Unfortunately, this is nothing new, and it has always been the case that well-heeled pressure groups attempt to turn their financial resources into political power.
Free Markets vs. the Plutocracy
The potential danger of this situation was not lost on the classical liberals (i.e., the libertarians) of generations past, who opposed "the privileged" among the wealthy who sought to exercise political power.
Specifically, it was the Jeffersonians, the Jacksonians, and other advocates of free markets and laissez-faire who attacked these monied groups under a variety of names. Names like “stock jobbers,” the “new aristocracy,” the “scrip nobility,” and “the plutocracy” have all been employed to draw attention to a wealthy elite which manipulates Congress and the central bank in schemes of economic exploitation.
The Classical Liberals and Economic Exploitation
This language of “exploitation” might strike some readers as odd. Unfortunately, a certain naïve view of social classes has become popular among some conservatives and libertarians who think that that the concept of “class warfare” was invented by the Marxists. Moreover, some even insist that the wealthy classes pose no threat to political or market institutions, and that the wealthy seek only to mind their own business.
But, as historian Ralph Raico has explained, the idea of exploitation of one class by another was, in fact, pioneered by the classical liberals. It was these liberals who well understood that the power of the state could be harnessed by one group for the purposes of extracting resources from another group. Left to itself, of course, the marketplace does not foster exploitation, as market activities are voluntary. Once the state is involved, however, the coercive power of the regime changes the equation. The key to success in exploiting others lays in harnessing the power of the state to carry out the exploiters’ schemes. The wealthy have never been immune to this temptation.
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