You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.
Interpretation
Inequality in society inevitably leads to repression or revolt.
This quote by Nick Hanauer emphasizes the direct correlation between social inequality and the potential for either oppressive governance or civil unrest. Hanauer suggests that when wealth and resources are not distributed fairly, societal stability is at risk, making the emergence of a repressive state or a rebellion an inevitable outcome, highlighting the urgency of addressing inequality.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the implications of economic policies on social stability.
The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker.
Raising the minimum wage allows business people to stop thinking about workers simply as costs to be cut and allows you to start thinking about workers as customers to be cultivated.
When you have a tax system in which most of the exemptions and the lowest rates benefit the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.
The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense.
The thing I've learned most about poverty is how expensive it is to be poor. It's super easy to pay rent every month if you earn enough to pay rent and have a decent job. It's super hard to pay rent if you need a coupon from the state and then need to go find an apartment that will accept that coupon and only that coupon.
If low taxes were the way that people like me created wealth, then we'd be starting our companies in the Congo or Somalia or Afghanistan, but we're not. We come to places where there are lots and lots of customers.
The threat of China is not military. The threat of China is they can't be intimidated. Europe you can intimidate. When the US tries to get people to stop investing in Iran, European companies pull out, China disregards it. You look at history and understand why - they've been around for 4,000 years, they have contempt for the barbarians, they just don't give a damn.
When you die, it will not be because you are sick, but because you were alive.
To ignore Scripture is to ignore Christ.
You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt.
He had long ago learned that society imposes insults that must be borne, comforted by the knowledge that in this world there comes a time when the most humble of men, if he keeps his eyes open, can take his revenge on the most powerful.
Peace as a positive condition of society, not merely as an interim between wars, is something so unknown that it casts no images on the mind's screen.
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