{"id":176904,"date":"2020-02-22T00:16:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-22T05:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/02\/22\/its-not-the-money-asymmetry-its-the-power-asymmetry\/"},"modified":"2020-02-22T00:16:00","modified_gmt":"2020-02-22T05:16:00","slug":"its-not-the-money-asymmetry-its-the-power-asymmetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/02\/22\/its-not-the-money-asymmetry-its-the-power-asymmetry\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s Not the Money Asymmetry, It’s the Power Asymmetry"},"content":{"rendered":"
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez notes what should be obvious, that the problem with inequality in our society is not the money, it’s the power<\/a>:<\/div>\n

On Monday morning, Jeff Bezos announced the creation of a new $10 billion environmental foundation, the Bezos Earth Fund. This is on top of the $2 billion he already committed to the Bezos Family Foundation to build preschools and fight homelessness. <\/p>\n

The combined sum might be a fraction of his net worth, and Bezos might have a history of standing in the way<\/a> of political efforts to address some of the same problems he seeks to address with his charity. Even so, many would argue that his efforts are still praiseworthy. <\/p>\n

In a Martin Luther King Jr Day discussion with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argued for a very different perspective<\/a>. If Jeff Bezos \u201cwants to be a good person,\u201d she said, he should \u201cturn Amazon into a worker cooperative.\u201d She argued that our primary message to billionaires shouldn\u2019t be that we want to redistribute their money. Instead, it should be that \u201cwe want their power.\u201d <\/p>\n

In making this distinction, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez was giving voice to an idea with deep roots in socialist thought \u2014 that the unequal distribution of wealth is just a symptom of the deeper problem of the unequal distribution of economic power. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Inequality is a self-reinforcing phenomenon.<\/p>\n

As inequality increases, the powerful are increasingly in the position of stacking the deck in their own favor.<\/p>\n

Rinse, lather, repeat. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez notes what should be obvious, that the problem with inequality in our society is not the money, it’s the power: On Monday morning, Jeff Bezos announced the creation of a new $10 billion environmental foundation, the Bezos Earth Fund. This is on top of the $2 billion he already committed to the Bezos …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[698,597,504],"class_list":["post-176904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-alexandria-ocasio-cortez","tag-inequality","tag-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176904"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}