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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> As wealth inequality continues to worsen, it makes more and more sense to solely target high earners because you make the same or more as selling higher amounts of lower priced product but with less overhead.

This is exactly why everything like Disney has moved upmarket, with pricing rising far above inflation.

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It works right up until some form of revolution, either politically or violently. We are far from anything like that but I'd rather not get close to the line. I think I'm a minority view though, despite being in the top 10% myself.

It is also shocking how little my life compares to the rich people I see. I don't own two houses or a yacht. We don't take yearly vacations to a chateau in France. The gap between the top 10% and the top 1% is insane. The gap between the 1% and the 0.1% is even larger still.

But hey... not like the rich getting richer and saying "screw you" to everyone else has ever led to negative consequences right? Nothing to see here, business as usual.

Did anyone ever stop Marcus Licinius Crassus from destroying the Roman Republic? (patron of Julius Caesar and Romes richest man ever).

The Parthians sure did :)

Caesar was a populist reformer. The Roman Republic was long destroyed at that point, due primarily to concentration of wealth and replacement of the plebians with slaves.

First Triumvirate.

Crassus amasses so much wealth because Caesar helped him.

And Crassus was the rich man who was monopolizing all of Rome with his slave firefighters + real estate scheme. When the going got tough, they seekwd power from the rich guy, no one was stopping Crassus.

I think you have the wrong end of the stick (trying to map it onto contemporary politics?).

Caesar was killed by the same people (hardline conservative ultra-wealthy 'Optimate' families/factions) who also brutally murdered the tribune of the plebs (person appointed to beg the ultra-wealthy for favorable legislation) and his supporters not once but twice. He was killed for the same reason too - land redistribution, limits on slave labor. That was called 'tyranny' by the elites.

Crassus was wealthy before Caesar and died before Caesar took power. This kind of politicking was just a necessary evil in the Roman Republic - which always was an oligarch-controlled plutocracy and never a true democracy as we know it today (e.g. Athens). It was 'pay to play', sponsorship of the ultra-wealthy was not optional.

If by Disney you mean tickets to Disneyland and similar theme parks, then pricing rising above inflation actually reflects wealth inequality getting smaller, not bigger. A lot more people in the world than in decades past now have enough wealth to consider traveling to one of the small number of Disney theme parks in the world and spending time there, and there's only so many people who can fit in the park at once. The Disney corporation could (and has) built more parks around the world, but maybe you care about Disneyland specifically, and there's only one of those today just like in the 1950s when it was built.

What are you talking about? We can actually track wealth inequality and it has not lowered at all within the last 50 years lol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...

https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri...

There's a lot of people who live outside the united states.

> There's a lot of people who live outside the united states.

True... but not really relevant here.

Wealth inequality is a global problem.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/24/un-global-ineq...

> This is exactly why everything like Disney has moved upmarket, with pricing rising far above inflation.

Also the logic of what Broadcom/Avago did with VMware: only chase the whales.

The issue is that there isn't economic demand from that audience for approximately 90% of companies operating today. Maybe Disney can succeed by going upmarket, but can all the animation/filmmaking/TV/theme park companies they compete with?

The number of millionaires/billionaires/etc feels low enough that there won't be demand for dozens of companies in every possible industry. The ones that have the biggest fanbase/cultural footprint maybe stick around, but the majority would presumably just go under.

> This is exactly why everything like Disney has moved upmarket, with pricing rising far above inflation.

Yeah, and not just individual destinations but entire destination cities.

See, for example, the radical reshaping of Las Vegas.

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