Okeefenokee wrote:Since wealth is inanimate, there is no letting or not letting wealth accumulate. You say it that way to hide what you're really saying. You want to stop people from being able to accumulate wealth. The end of that road is totalitarianism. We've seen it enough times. Not interested.
What anyone wants does not matter. It is a binary solution set. Peaceful reforms, or unpeaceful reforms. Peace, or war.
Regardless of the political, or economic systems used, a group of people always succeed at gaming the system and accumulate great wealth. Since the end result of unfettered wealth accumulation is the vacuuming up of all wealth from everyone else into the coffers of a very few, very wealthy, and now very powerful small elite which invariable impose a form of totalitarianism on all everyone else, what is the difference? There is no choice really. If wealth accumulation is not halted, and preferable reversed, our country will fall sooner than later. At the very least, we will become a police state in order to protect the very wealthy, powerful small elite class.
I can tell you that the fall of Empires usually happens at the same time, or at least civil unrest, or actual civil wars. Every. Damn. Time. The unbalance becomes too great. It is like a law of nature. Akkad, Assyria, Both the Roman Republic and Roman Empire, various Chinese Dynasties, France, the various revolutions of 1848, and yes, the United States in the 1880s-1910s, and the 1930s.
Only when an emperor, king, prime minister, president, or a group of reformers succeed in halting, and then reducing the trend are collapses, or unrest, stopped. Or at least the cause of a downfall becomes external, and not internal.
So we have two choices. Do you want successful peaceful reforms, which has happened, albeit rarely, or unrest possibly leading to outright civil war, which has happen a lot?