Welcome to the end of democracy – The Spectator World
We bemoan autocracies in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Russia and China but largely ignore the more subtle authoritarian trend in the West. Don t expect a crudely effective dictatorship out of Orwell s Nineteen Eighty-Four: we may remain, as we are now, nominally democratic, but be ruled by a technocratic class empowered by greater powers of surveillance than those enjoyed by even the nosiest of dictatorships.
The new autocracy rises from a relentless economic concentration which has engendered a new and fabulously wealthy elite. Five years ago, around four hundred billionaires owned as much as half of the world s assets. Today, only one hundred billionaires own that share, and Oxfam reduces that number to a mere twenty-six. In avowedly socialist China, the top one percent of the population holds about one-third of the country s wealth, up from 20 percent two decades ago. Since 1978, China s Gini coefficient, which measures inequality of wealth distribution, has tripled.
An OECD report issued before the Covid pandemic finds that almost everywhere, the non-rich share of national wealth has declined. These trends can be seen even in social democracies like Sweden and Germany. In the United States, as the conservative economist John Michaelson put it succinctly in 2018, the economic legacy of the last decade is excessive corporate consolidation, a massive transfer of wealth to the top 1 percent from the middle class.
Joel Kotkin.
I think a fair bit of our current difficulties are attributable to (wait for it!) our fiat-based system of currency which elevates our ruling class as mavens of the global reserve currency, at the same time as it immiserates our local manufacturing class. We’d still be an unequal society, but quite a bit less so, and generally healthier, if we didn’t have an inflationary, global reserve currency. Not exactly an original thought (see Lynn Alden on YouTube) but I really think there’s something to this mode of mostly Austrian-style analysis.