Conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza has remarked that “there are probably more Marxists on the faculty of our elite colleges than there are in all of Russia and Eastern Europe.” Any right-of-center American who has received a contemporary social science education can confirm that D’Souza is right: though Marxism purports to represent the disenfranchised, it is, in truth, the domain of a privileged elite.
Politico reports on a recent “Inclusive Capitalism” conference: the “conference was off the record, but its invitation-only attendees were a roll call of the global plutocracy, including Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, Blackstone co-founder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman, and the CEOs of UBS, GlaxoSmithKline, Dow Chemical and Honeywell.”
The theme of the conference was the imposition of monetary egalitarianism through policies like income and property taxation. Notably, its keynote speaker – Christine Lagarde – quoted Karl Marx’s prediction that capitalism “carried the seeds of its own destruction” alongside Pope Francis’ condemnation of material inequality as “the root of social evil.”
Politico’s Chrystia Freeland notes that the conference is part of a pattern: individuals like the CEO of McDonalds seem increasingly willing to support policies, e.g. an increased minimum wage, that will raise their costs in the short-term. Of course, there is an obvious economic explanation for this phenomenon: policies which punish businesses in general serve as barriers to entry, protecting already-established entities from competition and helping to create a fixed economic elite.
[about_ian]
