Intra-Elite Competition: A Key Concept for Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Soc

[pbrower2a]

(07-28-2017, 02:59 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: I suspect that high concentration of wealth is a characteristic of precrisis periods, and that dissipating that concentration is a characteristic of the crisis itself.  Intraelite competition may be involved in dissipating the concentration of wealth as some of the elites are destroyed and their wealth dissipated.

High levels of inequality of wealth and income typically go together. Persistent wealth is typically a multiple of yearly earnings (castles, mansions, baubles, and the like are dissipation of wealth); people who get above-average income typically invest some of what they make, also creating wealth. When most people are earning little, small savers and investors usually end up going through what they have, with such wealth being transferred to economic elites. Needless to say, the disappearance of a middle class is a great stress.

But those elites are obvious targets themselves for dispossession, whether by foreign powers or by revolutionary aspirants. To defend themselves most effectively they must support armies and police through taxation upon themselves in the event that nobody else has any funds. 

Quote:The effort to repeal the ACA has at least temporarily failed.  This means it's likely that bailouts to the health insurance companies in the form of federal subsidies to the risk corridors - subsidies that have been ruled unconstitutional - will cease.  With or without the subsidies, the ACA exchanges will likely fail in a spiral between rising prices and dropping participation.

Are the health insurance companies going to be a group of losing elites?  Was the ACA itself an effort by elites - health insurers and corporate hospitals - to prevent the rise of a large group of elite aspirants, the doctors?

Cost control; was a necessity, and the insurance companies had few incentives for controlling costs other than workers' pay. So was a means of funding it -- most likely a VAT (user pays) and perhaps some excise taxes on tobacco and liquor (abuser pays!)

Quote:Will part of the crisis be a complete or near complete collapse of the health care system as currently constituted?

Much more will be at risk. Every institution will be at risk.

America so far has been fortunate in avoiding wars that devastate American property. Figuring that should America end up in a war as destructive to America as WWII was destructive to Germany and Japan, any post-Crisis leadership will need to establish priorities on what recovers first. It would seem likely that energy production (as in oil refineries) would take precedence over cosmetics. Spartan pre-fabricated housing and huge blooks of flats with Stalinist architecture may replace middle-class housing from the immediate post-war period if much of the world of "Beaver Cleaver" should be wrecked or incinerated.  Enrichment and indulgence of elites will be a low priority, especially if those elites are seen culpable for the horrors of the Crisis.