Global warming

[pbrower2a]

Is it any surprise? Extreme economic inequality tends to reinforce itself by allowing those already rich to buy the system from the mass media to politics to religion to educational institutions to law enforcement. If infrastructure is built, then it well serves the rich and only them -- and the poor get to pay for it with high taxes. Laws might enforce something close to peonage, and arrests for minor offenses may lead to convict leases that may never pay off a hefty fine for such an offense as vagrancy. (Convict have been illegal since World War II in America since FDR outlawed them because such practices imitated what the fascist Axis Powers were doing with people under occupation or pariahs within their countries).  

Universities and colleges might become propaganda houses on such topics as economics and other social sciences; professors may know that if they are to hold a chair at a post-secondary institution that they are wise to say exactly what the economic elites want them to say (such as that economic inequality and crony capitalism are themselves the only ways to prosperity, that poor people deserve to be poor because of their personal faults, that high margins and low volumes of commerce are better than 'unruly' competition,  and that workers need to work harder and longer, showing "love" for their employers so that they can deserve more pay. K-12 teachers know enough to insert mandated material praising plutocracy into their lesson plans, and preachers who preach that Jesus demanded that elites treat the poor with dignity that they will preach no more. News media are honeycombed with ads praising capitalism at its harshest, and journalists well know the taboos. Law enforcement enforces subordination in all things. 

Poverty itself takes away even the hope of improved lives in This World. Poor kids might be unable to stay in school because their labor might be critical to keeping families from starving. Tough luck on schooling!

It is worth remembering that however the Great Depression was infamous for destroying wealth at its inception, most of it was a time of economic growth and social improvement. The 40-hour workweek and the minimum wage became the norm. In part because minimum wage laws improved the lot of bread-winners of the time and effectively made the hiring of child labor impossible (child labor is infamously unproductive), teenagers started graduating from high school and were better prepared to work. Minimum wages and Social Security also forced plenty of old people into retirement. Yes, old people today, well educated and still competent, can do highly-responsible jobs well... but they are unproductive, accident-prone people in industrial work. They and children were disproportionate shares of people killed or maimed on the job.  

Neoliberal economics have yet to return America to the Second Gilded Age of the 1920's which of course imploded due to a speculative boom to be expected in a time of maximal inequality), but they have reversed social and economic progress. Real wages ended up lower than they were in the 1970's. Education and medical care became fiendishly expensive. Privatization of infrastructure has made it far more expensive to use (just think of the lease arrangement of the Indiana Toll Road). Tolls increase automatically or in accordance with per capita income or the consumer price level -- whichever is higher. I try to avoid the Toll Road, and I can avoid two-lane sections of US 20 (which is full of Amish buggies).

(Optimal tolls on rural expressways are zero because of reductions of vehicle crashes and injuries and deaths therefrom. Urban routes? Toll the Hell out of whatever is  inside some ring road (like I-465 near Indianapolis) so that people have a strong incentive to use mass transit). 

Plutocracy is an inhuman ideology for economic inequality and its immediate consequences, but it also imposes pervasive corruption.