Neo-Feudalism

Silverfiddle Rant!

Joel Kotkin casts a weather eye on California governor Gavin Newsom outsourcing his state's economic recovery to a task force of high tech robber barons:

When Steyer and other members of the task force—one can’t help but compare them to the crime commission run in New York City by Charles “Lucky” Luciano—decide to open the economy, they will no doubt claim, as with their climate pieties, that they are acting purely on the basis of “science”—as long as it agrees with their conclusions.

Meanwhile, the world's billionaire plutocrats continue to be targeted by the victims of globalism. This could get good:

Most people want billionaires to pitch in to aid poverty and inequality

NEW YORK, April 29 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Eight out of 10 people think billionaires should help end poverty, inequality and a host of global ills, a poll showed on Wednesday, as funding shortages and the new coronavirus stymied hopes of meeting the United Nations' development goals for 2030.

Around the world, there are more than 2,000 billionaires worth a combined $10 trillion, said Martijn Lampert, research director of Glocalities.

"People see that billionaires have a moral obligation to contribute," he said. "This crisis shows the huge inequalities there are, and in the end I think every billionaire has to show his or her true color."

"We will need to tax high-net worth, especially after the current disaster," said Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a U.N. initiative, who was involved in the study.

Those billionaires are smart people who have an uncanny ability to read a poker table and decide when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em (RIP, Kenny Rogers!) They know how to negotiate and come out on top. They won't go down easy, but they have sown the seeds for the bitter fruit people are pelting them with.

They’ve all been talking socialistic crap for years, while sluicing trickles of their vast fortunes smartly and efficiently:  Dodging taxation that hands money to inefficient governments and wasteful NGOs. Instead, they have maximized their bang for the buck by forming their own global philanthropic organizations to feed and inoculate the poor and address global ills.

Look for billionaires to defend this model as they ramp up doling out billions, publicly and loudly, even as people clamor for more. As government models continue to reveal their inherent weaknesses, we could end up witnessing a new global feudalism where the billionaire world controllers eclipse and marginalize hapless government and exercise direct power and influence over a reshaped hierarchy of lords, vassals and peasants.

Think it will happen?  Maybe not.  I take comfort in the notion--brilliantly articulated by Puckish Canadian David Warren-- that The World Cannot be Fixed.