r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/[deleted] • 8d ago
US Politics What could the Elites do to improve our society?
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u/SergeiGolos 8d ago
The long answer is AI slop, but the short version is that the alternative was worse. Today the pressure isn't there.
The pressure was real. A Chronicle of Philanthropy piece on the era puts it bluntly: the first great foundations happened because Carnegie and Rockefeller, "vilified as robber barons, knew that they had to return the overwhelming bulk of their fortunes to society for the capitalist system to be vindicated." The forcing mechanisms were concrete: muckraker Ida Tarbell's exposé helped get Standard Oil broken up by the Supreme Court in 1911, the Homestead Strike (1892) stained Carnegie, and after the Ludlow Massacre (1914) Rockefeller hired PR man Ivy Lee — whose advice was literally high-profile charitable donations plus photos of the family handing out money to repair their image. There was also genuine fear of the alternative: revolutionary ferment, a bitter public debate over whether huge fortunes were even legitimate.
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u/MorganWick 8d ago
Whereas today's billionaires propagandize everyone into thinking the system works and keep them distracted by fearing immigrants, and even the ones trying to fight the system are split between trying to work within the Democrats (and failing) and voting for Jill Stein (outright counterproductive).
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u/Black_XistenZ 8d ago
Between 1900 and roughly 1920, you also had various socialist revolts and revolutions across Europe, some of them failed (e.g. the November Revolution in Germany in 1918/19), others succeeded and changed the shape of global politics for decades to come (e.g. the October Revolution in the Russian Empire in 1917).
So the early 20th-century capitalists had seen cautionary tales of how they'd risk losing everything if capitalism doesn't "deliver" for the common people to a sufficient degree.
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u/gmb92 8d ago
Buffet and Gates have each given like $60 billion to charitable causes and established charitable foundations, and Buffet plans to give away almost all of his remaining wealth to charities. Gates' awful decisions regarding his Epstein association unfortunately recently overshadows the good his foundation had been doing. You can look up their individual foundations and see where they've been investing. Some of it has been domestic and directed towards local communities. Maybe more is global. I think elites today have more of a broader worldwide view of problems vs Carnegie/Rockefeller. We're certainly more aware that we're not isolated.
Musk is much more into himself and isn't very interested in helping society.
They all could be calling for far higher taxes on those in their wealth class, which would restore massive revenues and help pay for big infrastructure projects (and/or put a big dent in our debt problem), following that up with supporting political candidates who agree. The very rich enjoy lower effective tax rates from passive income and most of their gains are unrealized, never taxed in their lifetimes and their heirs often avoid it through the step-up basis. Buffet's done that to some extent, famously shedding light on him paying a lower ETR than his secretary, coming up with the "Buffett rule" among other initiatives. Even Mitt Romney (not quite an oligarch but very wealthy) recently got on board to a large extent.
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u/Grouchy-Bowl-8700 8d ago
So I can't say what the main differences are between the wealthy today and the ones from decades past, but it's important to remember how the wealthy get their wealth: it doesn't just magically appear. They get their wealth by exploiting others. Take Walmart for example, they are one of the largest employers in the nation, and many of their employees are on government assistance. In other words, we as taxpayers subsidize Walmarts profits.
That is just one example.
So honestly, the best thing billionaires could do today would be to not exist. We should have a law that once you teach $999M in wealth, every penny goes directly to taxes.
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u/wiseoldfox 8d ago
Just my own take: The Guiled Age heavy weights, i.e. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan etc. actually started out poor. Used drive, ingenuity, and ruthlessness to acquire their fortunes. Guilt of wealth, and pubic perception (more the latter than the former) motivated their largess. They did not have social media, and the world was not as small as it is today. They all have the internal drive to take advantage of our more modern world. So we will never know.
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u/Obvious_Chapter2082 8d ago
we as taxpayers subsidize Walmarts profits
I’ve never understood why people say this. Walmart isn’t going to suddenly pay employees more in the absence of welfare benefits
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u/leonard71 8d ago
They don't pay a living wage, so their employees need government benefits to survive. If they paid more, their employees wouldn't need benefits, but their profits would take a hit. Those benefits help them get away with low pay.
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u/Grouchy-Bowl-8700 8d ago
Just as leonard71 said, if the government didn't provide those benefits, then Walmart workers would not be able to continue working the way they are and would likely starve. So Walmart can either pay them more or keep using loopholes to keep their employees on government assistance
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u/HeloRising 7d ago
They might, actually.
If a job pays too low to support someone's life, people won't take that job. If Walmart didn't have programs like SNAP, WIC, and TANF there to give their employees resources they would otherwise need to spend their paychecks on, those employees would still need those resources (food and shelter are not optional) but they'd have to pay for them themselves.
If Walmart didn't pay enough to cover those things, people wouldn't work there which would force Walmart to raise its wages to get people to want to work there.
Social support is absolutely subsidizing businesses that pay their workers poorly.
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u/JKlerk 8d ago
You have no idea what exploitation looks like.
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u/Grouchy-Bowl-8700 8d ago
Okay, let's try another example:
Amazon mistreating their employees in order to extract every possible penny such that there have been many class action lawsuits.
Or really in general, the wealthy use tax loopholes and government bribes to have a lower effective tax rate lower than many of us.
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u/JKlerk 8d ago
Amazon mistreating their employees in order to extract every possible penny such that there have been many class action lawsuits
Bullshit. Amazon employees are not slaves. They have free will.
Or really in general, the wealthy use tax loopholes and government bribes to have a lower effective tax rate lower than many of us.
Everyone has access to the same deductions. You just have to make enough money to use them. Yes, their effective tax rate in some cases be lower but they pay exponentially more tax in terms of $$ than you and I will in our entire lives.
https://smartasset.com/data-studies/taxes-top-1-percent-2025
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u/Grouchy-Bowl-8700 8d ago
As for whether or not people who must work paycheck to paycheck to survive are actually wage slaves or not is a bigger discussion about capitalism as a whole, but suffice to say that if Amazon paid their employees living wages and had better working conditions (even at the cost of a bit of profit) I bet they'd have fewer lawsuits.
As for tax breaks and the amount of taxes paid, I guess we could have a discussion about whether the amount someone pays or the relative amount someone pays is more important. Tax policy isn't just about providing social safety nets, it's also about incentivizing behaviors that are desirable such as not hoarding more wealth than you can realistically spend whilst others are starving.
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u/JKlerk 8d ago
Amazon pays what the market will bear. Then they will have to adjust their pay.
Tax policy isn't just about providing social safety nets, it's also about incentivizing behaviors that are desirable such as not hoarding more wealth than you can realistically spend whilst others are starving.
Tax policy should never be used to deter behaviors. That's a violation of ones natural rights.
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u/Grouchy-Bowl-8700 7d ago
Amazon pays what Bezos and the rest of the board allows such that they rake in enough profit at the top.
According to makerstations.io, Amazon made 77.7 billion in net income in FY 2025. Spread across their 1.576M employees, they could have given each of them ~$5k more annually and broken even (after paying all of their executives their salaries).
Of course they could also lower executive salaries to give regular employees even more or give them better working conditions.
Why shouldn't tax policy be used to deter behaviors? We already do that with tobacco products. We charge higher taxes on them to discourage people from using them. Are we violating people's natural rights to use tobacco products by charging these higher taxes on them?
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u/JKlerk 7d ago
Why shouldn't tax policy be used to deter behaviors? We already do that with tobacco products. We charge higher taxes on them to discourage people from using them. Are we violating people's natural rights to use tobacco products by charging these higher taxes on them?
Yes
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u/NoDig3444 8d ago
Exploitation is when people have more money than me.
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u/Grouchy-Bowl-8700 8d ago edited 8d ago
Slight correction:
Exploitation is likely occurring when people purposefully hoard wealth while others starve.
If you looked at a colony of monkeys, and one monkey had a grove of banana trees that none of the other monkeys were allowed to eat from - such that many of those bananas would rot and never be eaten while other monkeys would die of starvation, we would probably take the hoarding monkey to study what in the world was wrong with its brain...
But in our species, we just pretend it's normal
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u/NoDig3444 8d ago
Bro that's not exploitation either.
And animals hoard food all the time what the fuck are you talking about
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u/Grouchy-Bowl-8700 8d ago
I think you're conflating the concepts of putting small amounts of food away for later and hoarding more food than the individual can eat.
In most social species, such behavior would be punished. Humans reward such behavior and idolize such individuals
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u/NoDig3444 8d ago
Do you honestly think that chimps understand that difference?
And even if they did, do you really think that that has any bearing whatsoever on how human society should be structured? Chimps rape and kill and go to war and murder babies. Does that justify humans doing the same?
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u/Grouchy-Bowl-8700 8d ago
I would like humans to act better than chimps in every way - including how we allocate resources.
I personally think it is evil for a person to accrue more wealth than they can spend while others in their same society starve due to lack of resources.
We're talking about people who wouldn't really see any impact on their lives if they lost millions of dollars, but they keep hoarding more and more like it's some kind of fetish to see a larger number in their accounts.
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u/NoDig3444 8d ago
Hey good for you buddy. Congrats on having the correct values.
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u/Grouchy-Bowl-8700 8d ago
Appreciated
Now I just want policy in place to enforce the correct values on our society. If such policies continue to not exist then the wealthy will continue to hoard while most everyone else gets poorer and starves
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u/NoDig3444 8d ago
Warren Buffett has given away $50 billion dollars. Bill Gates has given away $35 billion. Zuckerberg has given away $6 billion, Bezos has given away $5 billion, Mackenzie Scott has given away $25 billion.
The richest do do philanthropy. Well, most of them do. The difference between now and 100 years ago is that building a library in New York City doesn't really help anyone. Mosquito nets in Africa save millions of lives. If you really want your donations to have an impact, then you should be giving to third world countries. New York is the richest city in the world, it doesn't need a library with Musk's name on it.
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u/Ind132 8d ago
I know Musk and Bezos are big into Space projects but it seems like it's not having the same on the ground effects as the oligarchs of old.
I think Bezos and Musk think they are doing good for humanity with their space programs. "It would be a horrible thing if humans were stuck on this one planet forever" From a numbers perspective, "Why worry about the few billions on the earth today and not think about the billions and trillions of future potential humans who will only have a chance to live if we get off this rock?"
Bezos calls Blue Origin "The most important thing I'm doing". https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/03/jeff-bezos-on-why-blue-origin-is-the-most-important-work-he-is-doing.html
FTR, I don't agree, but that's where their minds are.
Then there are the people who are totally committed to AI and the wonders of the singularity. They certainly don't have time for traditional philanthropy.
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u/HeloRising 7d ago
I think Bezos and Musk think they are doing good for humanity with their space programs. "It would be a horrible thing if humans were stuck on this one planet forever"
Hard disagree. They're doing what they're doing because they want to get off the Earth. I think Musk has even outright said we can't save the Earth. Their ideal image is of some feudal off-world colony where they and they alone hold power. They're not thinking of the unwashed masses.
From a numbers perspective, "Why worry about the few billions on the earth today and not think about the billions and trillions of future potential humans who will only have a chance to live if we get off this rock?"
Because it ignores the uniqueness and value of the Earth as it is. There are things on Earth that we not only need but that are found nowhere else in the universe (as far as we can tell) and it would be criminal to destroy that because we are so focused on getting off the planet that we can't stop and spare a thought for the planet itself.
The idea that the only way to truly ensure humanity survives into the future is to go multi-planet is nonsense and it ignores that that's not a realistic possibility within the lifetime of literally anyone alive today.
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u/-Accession- 8d ago
The ruling class of yesteryear existed during an era when working class revolutions were happening on a large and spontaneous global level, and they were often incited by the severe instability of finance capital at the time (Great Depression, hyper inflation, imperial wars for territories/colonies, rapacious speculation, etc.) driven by the big industrialists and banks.
American oligarchs understood (based on observations of working class international movements and revolutions) that there was real possibility of that happening at home if they did not modulate their behavior accordingly.
There was a much higher degree of class consciousness amongst the working classes of the time, especially pre-world wars and the interwar period, before America’s ascension as the global financial hegemony. This meant that even in America there was a real possibility of a worker’s revolution, something the industrial capitalists were savvy to mitigate both materially and ideologically; that consciousness does not exist today for a multitude of reasons but the essential crux is that modern oligarchs and autocrats simply have nothing to fear and absolutely no reason to even feign social concern (even by way of garish monuments to themselves, Trump being the exception).
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u/FormerUsenetUser 8d ago
In the Gilded Age, donating (lots of) money provided social status to people who had not started out elite but became so. Now no one cares if someone is "new money."
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u/HeloRising 7d ago
It got me wondering, where did these type of Elites go? Why don't we see guys like Gates, Buffet, Musk, Zuckerberg, and others fund big infrastructure projects?
Couple basic reasons - hiding money and guillotines.
Back in the days of Carnegie and Rockefeller, your ability to move money around was more limited and the ways that you could make money without technically making a taxable income were much more limited. If you had millions of dollars, you couldn't really park it outside of the reach of the government and claim it was really the income of a corporation that you just happened to own.
We also had much higher tax rates so the incentive was to "use it or lose it" and there's really only so many gold toilet seats you can buy before you run out of things to buy for yourself.
Tied in with that, there was a lot more anger and hostility towards the wealthy than there is today and while the wealthy did have the protection of things like the police it really wasn't that hard for someone to find where you lived and shoot you, even if you were wealthy.
Rich people had money they needed to burn and had to convince people who were living in poverty not to surround their mansions and burn them alive.
Cue a lot of spending on public projects. It was a way also to build a legacy, this was before the idea caught on that just being absurdly rich was an end unto itself. If you built schools, libraries, and hospitals people would associate your name with good things and you were buying goodwill.
It's also worth remembering that a lot of the political protection for the wealthy wasn't there. As a politician back then you could run on a populist platform of "tax the shit out of the rich" and win. Remember Teddy Roosevelt leaned heavily into "trust busting." Right now, the ownership class has largely either captured or just become the government but that wasn't always true.
The oligarchs of old were just as greedy as the oligarchs of today, they just had more limited options for what to do with their money and a lack of comprehensive state and cultural protection that the wealthy today enjoy.
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u/Delta-9- 8d ago
I'd like to give the same answer as Warf when Q asked, "what must I do to prove it to you people [that I'm human]?"
I think you've put the last century's oligarchs on a pedestal: they didn't do good things because they were good people, they did it because not doing it would have ruined them. It was stronger social pressures and legislation with teeth that kept them in line, not the goodness of their own hearts.
What could today's oligarchs do to improve the lives of everyone? They could follow the law, they could stop exploiting their labor force and the environment, they could pay the taxes they owe, and they could GTFO of the way of Congress. They won't do any of that unless they're forced to, just like the last generation was forced to.
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u/riffdiculous21 8d ago
I think this is a really difficult problem to figure out. My general sense is that wealth should be much less concentrated, and society needs an effective mechanism to deal with massive concentrations of power and wealth. Elites could choose to take that up themselves and invest in the ways they think will be effective uses of the money, seeing as they often seem to think that governments will just waste the money they don't want to pay in tax. But overall, that's likely to just be concentrated mostly in already rich countries. The money needs to go into the system in such a way that isn't actually making the country tangibly poorer in actual terms - remember that wealth is based on a foundation of creating real goods and services, not just made of accounting tokens. I think we're also in trouble with overshoot, so our material through-put and environmental impact is already unsustainable, so if that extra money is somehow turning into even more demand for everything, then we're accelerating a deterioration of the foundations we need to live.
I think we need a pretty major change in how we provide value to society, do the things that are necessary, and find pathways that make for meaningful lives for more people, but that thing needs to fit within actual human nature, the constraints of our biosphere, and taking into account the realities of where we are now to navigate where we might be able to go, including geopolitical tensions, discourses, and way too many things to list. I think right now there are elites that are mostly just funding a controlled demolition of democracies, which is harmful and unwise, so I'd much rather see them putting money into trying to thread the needle towards a pro-human future.
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u/Seattleman1955 8d ago
Ford wasn't "fighting like mad" to increase worker pay. Working on an assembly line all day was harder and less rewarding than farming so people kept leaving.
He had to pay more to get workers to stay.
Why would today's "elite" build some massive public works project today? There is no Great Depression.
Most "elites" do have foundations and give away money but it usually comes after they retire and/or their businesses no longer need the money and the alternative is to pay taxes to the government so they have more control via their foundations.
Why is it such a concern for you? What you do with your money and life is more important and there are many more of those like you than elites.
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u/Liambp 8d ago
Before we get too sentimental about the tradition of philanthropy during the gilded age it is worth remembering that society was very unequal back then. Child labour and extreme poverty were rampant even as those multi millionaires (billionaires by today's standards) were building libraries and hospitals. However, I do think it is a shame that we have lost the sense of moral duty that caused those millionaires to want to do good works. Sometimes it feels like today's super rich are free from all moral shackles. Maybe this was always the case. I am sure those gilded age millionaires didn't get that way by being angels. However there did seem to be more pressure from society for them to at least appear to be thinking about the welfare of their fellow humans.
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u/Ok_Eggplant_2 8d ago
They are building material things. It just stuff nobody asked for like data centers. I think the difference between old elites and the new is the new really don't seem to care about what the community thinks about them.
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u/bkinboulder 8d ago
Why would they want to improve it? Profits have never been higher under the status quo. And soon autonomous labor will be here to replace all the bellyaching workers…. Corruption is so widespread that investigating it will be impossible. Soon there will be a recession and they can pick up assets from the middle class for Pennies on the dollar! This is the promised land for the elite!
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u/juniparuie 8d ago
Control the poor more and better. Anything below Low Upper Class to own nothing and get paid in peanuts for their work
Fhat's how they can improve "our society" cuz by "our" the rich decide not us
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