No they did not. It's easier for a small number of people to coordinate, than a large number.
The wealthy have about as much power as the entire middle class, but can wield it better because they are more nimble.
That doesn't change the state of the negotiation, which is that cutting taxes for the middle class will also require cutting them for the wealthy.
If you optimize for your own personal notion of fairness, or retribution, you may very well fail to coordinate in your own self-interest.
> It's easier for a small number of people to coordinate, than a large number.
That's basically my main argument for replacing election-based democracy by lottery-based democracy. Electing the right representatives is a coordination problem in and of itself, a process which the wealthy are already quite adept at manipulating, so we might as well cut the middle man and pick a random representative sample of the population instead, who can then coordinate properly.
It's generally easier to make such a process tamper-proof than an election. You can pick a cryptographically secure open source PRNG and determine the seed in a decentralized way by allowing anyone to contribute a salt into a list which is made public at the deciding moment. Then anyone can verify the integrity of the process by verifying the seed includes their contribution, and computing the candidates themselves.
>You can pick a cryptographically secure open source PRNG and determine the seed in a decentralized way by allowing anyone to contribute a salt into a list which is made public at the deciding moment.
If that were a viable model for the real world, we could make existing elections just as tamper-proof.
I don't really want to cut taxes for the working/middle class though. I want to tax the everliving fuck out of the hyper-wealthy, to the point that they cease to exist. The money should go into providing goods and services for the working/middle class, but collecting that money and lighting it on fire (or parking assets in a sovereign wealth fund) is a superior option to doing nothing.
Neither our democracy nor our position as a world power survived capitalism eating itself and everything else. We are down to single individuals holding more nominal wealth than whole continents, and the worship of the billionaire has replaced the worship of Jesus Christ for most Americans, a palace cult committing national suicide on your behalf. If you want any of the things that America pitched as its merits in fighting for influence in the Cold War, you want this situation over with.
Let them eat three commas and not a penny more. When you become a billionaire we give you a medal and confiscate every dollar above 1 billion. Using a carrier strike group if necessary.
They're not standing still now. They're eating our entrails. Right now.
We haven't passed a budget in almost 30 years, we've been routinely filibustering nearly all legislation for 15 (breaking the gameplay loop for electoral democracy), we're unilaterally withdrawing from trade and military alliances week by week. We have fascist armies on the streets pulling people from their cars and houses. Our leaders openly brag about their corruption and a good fraction of our people praise them for it simply because it pisses other people off.
We are allegedly about to "Federalize Elections" and also enter a war with Iran that a supermajority of voters do not want.
In terms of state capacity, in terms of our agency in the world, in terms of what we historically regarded as our legacy and our culture and our material security and our institutions, we are in freefall. And it is mostly down to having far too much wealth concentrated in far too few people.
Have you considered that enforcing any right against a wealthy person is punishing them for being successful? They can't come on your property, that's a punishment.
The prospect of "Attack" and "Literal War" is limited by the fact that worst-case resistance involves a drone strike, and worst-case compliance involves retaining enough wealth for you and everyone you know to live on the beach sipping mojitos for the rest of your natural lives, while holding a nice trophy.
Just not, you know, a space program and a larger military than Krushchev's reporting to you personally.
That doesn't change the state of the negotiation, which is that cutting taxes for the middle class will also require cutting them for the wealthy. If you optimize for your own personal notion of fairness, or retribution, you may very well fail to coordinate in your own self-interest.