My major take on the entire question of income inequality is that the only thing that's going to break it, income inequality being a bad measure of quality of life, is if everyone suffers. What establishes any meritocracy or any system that can be predictably exploited by the masses is consistency. You have to be able to understand a level playing field so that level playing fields and consequent fair rules can be propagated throughout society. This takes time and discipline.
But what if your desire was to disable the corruptions of the powerful? Given that what establishes much of monopoly is regulatory capture, what if democracy itself was used against level regulatory playing fields. In one sense this is what President Trump is doing to the trade relationship between the US and China. He is being unpredictably arbitrary with his use of tariffs. What nobody really knows is which tariff he might raise or lower in punitive fashion and exactly which domestic businesses it might effect. For those of my associates who couldn't wait to see Trump's brand of chaos upset the Beltway Establishment, this is punk music to their ears.
So while I think power should be distributed to the masses and Federal powers limited primarily because I am against the principle of monolithic scaling, I think it might be possible to establish a level of populist chaos that results in the creative destruction of regulatory capture. But short of this being done experimentally it is interesting to me to capture the marginal changes of policy in various industries and see what exactly the uninformed public is capable of doing. It seems to me that there are limits on the predictive abilities of lobbyists and in the implementations of hindsight as well and that those changes wrought by new regulations propagate in unexpected ways.
I come at this from the perspective of what the reasonable limits of populist, disruptive or revolutionary politics might be. How successful is reform? How timely? How consistently is energy expended? How many reconsiderations are necessary? How many police actions are required, expected, carried out?
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