A nation divided

The Rise of the Non-Working Rich

Robert Reich offers a summary of the facts and a modest, liberal proposal for mitigation of the growth of inherited fortunes in America.

Any serious effort about equality of opportunity, so far as it relies on equal access to unearned wealth, obviously requires limitations on gift and inheritance to ensure this.

Goodbye, inherited fortunes, in other words.

And the chance of that, or anything remotely like that, in an age of unchallenged capitalism?

Communism is gone, anarchism was never more than a slogan for street fighters, and socialism is an idle academic toy.

The challenges of the 19th and 20th Centuries were really bad ideas, I grant you.

But they were credible enough and had enough social support to scare the capitalists of the Occident, including the USA, into boxing with gloves on.

The result was a long rise of progressivism throughout the West.

With the disappearance of the threats they took off the gloves and put on brass knuckles.

Welcome to the irresistible emergence of the new world order of global democratic capitalism, in which both our major parties serve agendas that, in net, undermine progressivism and foster a new, global Gilded Age.