Wealth and income limits for individuals and companies are a start. No one needs to be a billionaire, and they sure as hell didn't earn it.
Regulation works in a theoretical world where the rules of the game are set by an outsider entity, which is powerful enough to enforce said rules and yet completely separate from economic power.
In real life, players affect the rules: lobbying, marketing, media ownership, cronyism…
Context: the speaker Lea Ypi is a professor of political philosophy. She grew up in socialist Albania, and here she's talking about how during her studies of political philosophy in Rome, her Western "socialist" classmates had a fantasy about socialism, and didn't want to hear about her experience growing up in socialism/about the socialist countries that have failed.
I have a feeling you're doing the same, just with a different -ism.
Then it’s not easy enough to deal with is it? And capitalism seems to have created this situation so you could are the that this is inherent in the system.
I mean, the solutions are easy, getting people to vote for them is a problem, although a problem more specific to the US.
> And capitalism seems to have created this situation so you could are the that this is inherent in the system.
I wouldn't say that, given most countries capitalist systems were able to deal with or avoid that situation altogether. Rather than this problem being inherent to capitalism, it seems it is the result of specific events that unfolded in the US. Really, it can all be traced back to Reagan.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
It might be interesting to try and find some more objective support of my claim, and I'll try and post anything worth posting, but anecdotally...the difference between the US and other developed countries is night and day. It's so incredibly easy to run into people in the US who genuinely astoundingly lack the basic knowledge that in other countries it is taken for granted that adults hold.
There's a reason other countries talk shows don't have segments like asking random pedestrians to name any country, literally any country on a world map, so they can laugh when they fail.
A lack of regulation.
> We are living in a world where corporations are people and it’s ok to lobby
Corporate personhood is not the same thing as "corporations are people". Lobbying wouldn't inherently be an issue with an education and caring voting population.
There's often some bait-and-switch semantic games employed to sell people on the latter.
Inequality is mostly a red herring and not a core issue in and of itself. Public spending as % of GDP has only really been going up for over a century, and we expect UBI and the like to be in our future. Meanwhile we're already seeing what those excesses can lead to in France if we're not careful.
The problem is not inequality itself, is that an entity that grows without a ceiling will eventually reach a size such that rules can’t be enforced on it. From that point on, laws are wet paper.
As for individuals, dynasty dissipates and breaks up in wealth. A rich person doesn't live forever, and seldom do competing offspring manage to generate as much. Their pile shrinks as they spend it away.
Notwithstanding that, name a dollar figure above Bezos' wealth at which suddenly he can operate outside the law. We can already see what concentrated power looks like; it is entrenched and intertwined with government, not operating outside its bounds. See: Xi Ping, Putin and others. Power often comes with wealth, but wealth in itself doesn't lead to that level of power, at least in the Liberal world.
Above? He already does. He does not need to break the law in a literal sense: he can have teams of lawyers exploiting their way into not paying taxes faster than the state can patch the laws, avoid antitrust through lobbying, he owns a newspaper to influence public opinion and elections if needed…
>wealth in itself doesn't lead to that level of power, at least in the Liberal world.
How many presidential pardons have been bought so far in the US this term?
This is unsubstantiated.
> avoid antitrust through lobbying
Lobbying does not guarantee any result, it is literally just asking the government for something you want. And, why does Amazon need to be subject to anti-trust? By far their most profitable product is AWS, and it has a ton of competitors.
> How many presidential pardons have been bought so far in the US this term?
This says a lot about Trump, but pardons? That's it?
It is substantiated enough to have its own article on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_tax_avoidance
>This says a lot about Trump, but pardons? That's it?
Do we really need an enumeration of cases where corporations and the rich and are intertwined with political power in the west?
If political pardons are too tame, or trump is considered an anomaly, we can just point in the general direction of Iraq.
> Do we really need an enumeration of cases where corporations and the rich and are intertwined with political power in the west?
Not a level of power that allows them to completely operate outside the law.