Daniel Greenfield wrote Capitalism: A Hate Story in his blog, The Sultan Knish, 2/27/13.

Excerpt:

The traditional image of the anti-capitalist as a ragamuffin who dies of consumption in his garret has always been at odds with the real image of the anti-capitalist as a rich man or the son of a rich man. When Obama launched his big push for higher taxes, he enlisted as his ally none other than the richest man in the country. And when Occupy Wall Street’s demographics were broken down, the courageous opponents of capitalism turned out to be the sons and daughters of the upper class.

This sort of thing isn’t a surprise, it’s history. Lenin’s father was a nobleman. Cuba’s dictator attended Castro’s wedding. The man of the people is rather often stuck at the bottom of the top of the pole. The people who make revolutions are not the dispossessed, but those who are close enough to see what power really looks like, but have no hope of wielding absolute power unless they enlist the mob. They are close enough to see the throne, but not close enough to non-violently sit down in it.

It’s a class war being waged by billionaires against people earning six figures a year. It’s millionaires making movies for profit using workers to denounce the practice of making things for profit using workers.

The middle class wasn’t wiped out by the individual accumulation of wealth, but by the political accumulation of wealth and power. The shift from capitalism to socialism means that the poor live better than they used to, but that they have nowhere to go. And that the middle class is on the road to joining them in a society with a small upper class and a huge lower class that is somehow meant to subsidize its own government benefits. The capitalist ladder over which millions could swarm has been traded in for a socialist elevator that takes you to the top floor if you denounce capitalism often enough, but mostly never goes anywhere.

Rather than a society of aspiring merchants and builders, we instead have a society of beggars and philosopher-kings. The beggars are expected to be angry and the philosopher-kings are expected to be charitable. Eventually the philosopher-kings will expect the beggars to work for very little in exchange for that charity and the beggars will find that social justice protests don’t work well against machine gun nests. Some might think that’s conspiracy, but it’s mostly just history. –

See more at: http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2013/02/capitalism-hate-story.html#sthash.i3Ze1ezE.dpuf

HKO

When those who seek power to better our lives use that power to live like kings, their hypocrisy goes unchecked. Political self interest serves us worse than economic self interest.  True liberals would challenge the dangerous accumulation of power in government.  When they grant power to further their aims they fail to visualize that same power used against them. Yet history is filled with this sequence.

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