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Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

As Warren Buffet put it, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

I agree with all of what you've said, although I think folks have been more willing contributors to the process than you suggest.

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This makes it sound like the wealthy colluded against the masses, which I don't think is accurate. It's a coordination trap: each individual is doing what's in their individual best interest, but the result is collectively bad for everyone. The solution is to change the incentives, e.g. laws that make it more profitable to clean up pollution than to pollute, but it seems unattainable because a feedback loop has concentrated power in the hands of the people who are most insulated from the problems, which is sort of the opposite of the intended outcome of democracy.

They colluded to enrich themselves without end. Seeking monopoly rents and pushing infrastructure, social and environmental costs on to others to increase the margin.

We allow the rewarding of truly psychotic behaviours, there is a reason why most executives seem to exhibit these traits.

I don't think "psychotic" means what you think it means. Perhaps you meant "psychopathic"?

There's events like Davos and the Bilderberg meetings where the rich and powerful literally do get together and define their agenda.

But for the most part, yeah they don't need to be centrally coordinated and probably aren't, because they are very good at identifying their interests and have the resources to work towards it.

I would hold a more charitable view towards this all, however, if it wasn't for the fact that the media, their sponsors, and the politicians are intentionally using wedge issues to disrupt and divide the masses.

> There's events like Davos and the Bilderberg meetings where the rich and powerful literally do get together and define their agenda.

Here's the website for the latest davos meeting: https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-m...

What type of "wealthy colluded against the masses" is happening there?

Look at the board of trustees from your very link. They are all highly placed execs in multinationals and political world leaders getting together to discuss Stakeholder Capitalism - ie; how to make capitalism palatable enough so that revolution does not take place.

They dress it up to make it sound like they're only interested in being ethical, but it's really about how to ensure that their position in society is maintained.

I'm not saying they will be sitting in dingy, cigar smoke filled rooms discussing how to crush the working class, but I am saying this is far more coordination than you will get from a mixture of people from the general population.

Class warfare doesn't imply collusion. It's just people acting in their own self interest in a system where some incentives are aligned along a class system. The dichotomy between conspiracy theory and and innocent coincidence is false.

The point of class warfare is that no, it's not collectively bad for everyone. It's good for whoever wins the class war (see: the quote above).

By far what terrifies the average person in the shareholder class the most is having to live the life of an average worker. The revealed preference they have is that, yes, they would rather live as rich in a world with the issues that entails than as an average worker in a more equitable world. And from a selfish perspective that's a perfectly rational position.

When shareholders or whole owners decide to do something immoral for profit - or even to prevent bankruptcy - what that actually reveals is that they would rather hurt whoever it is they are hurting than live their life in your shoes. This is the essence of the idea of class warfare.

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