Peanuts - I won't move the football this time

Wealth inequality never disappears, only the players names change.

Oh, and it also allows dissenters to be tortured and/or killed.

I'm a bit confused and wonder if you could clarify. Are you suggesting that so-called "trickle-down" economics, associated with (among many other things) post-Soviet Russia and Pinochet Chile, is an intentional plot TOWARDS Communism? Do I have that right?

Of course. What leads to citizen revolt? When all of the capital goes upwards, class warfare becomes a reality. When people are arrested and put in prison for laws created to subjugate them, like the current drug laws on the books that do nothing more than keep corporate prisons full, it becomes a fertile ground for dissent. Look through history and you'll see two things that caused communism to come into power: invasion by a communist power or revolution from within. Czarist Russia fell because of the major inequality in income. Chinese communism was originally supported by the USSR, and they became a superpower by the mere size of their population. When the masses are on the ropes, they'll do anything and hope for the best. If our political system worked as the founding fathers set it up, there wouldn't be a problem.

Trickle down does not work. Venture capitalist Nick Hauer pointed that out in a TED talk some time ago. The money goes upward but too much of it stays there, like a dammed river. A family making $35K a year still uses 90%+ of their income in just survival. Housing, food, clothes. Pretty much the bare essentials. That's what stimulates the economy. But them you have the CEOs that make 300 times that. Do they pay out 90%+ of their income to survive? Hauer pointed out that he only buys a few pair of pants a year. Say max, 5 pair. He may spend more for those pants than what you would at, say, Walmart, but look at what percent of your income goes into buying those pants. Figure his is a lot less.

Trickle down does not work as it pulls money out of the flow of capital. The powxer keg is lit.

Since the great depression, when taxes were high on the top tiers, the money would be reinvested to reduce tax liability. The most prosperous years were the 50s, when the top tiers were paying taxes of as much as 90%. Instead of putting that money into government coffers, businesses and investors put it into improving their own assets. They invested in machinery, real estate, and employees to reduce their tax liability. With lower taxes, they don't have to, so they won't, which leads to high unemployment, which hurts the economy

People have been saying that trickle down economics doesn't work almost immediately after it was invented - I'm not sure where the TED talks come into it.

It's always interesting to draw parallels between different systems of government (the George Orwell effect) but make no mistake: neoliberalism is a VERY different kettle of fish to Communism and I find your thesis simply not believable - why would they have gone through the trouble of overthrowing Salvador Allende's communist government in favor of Pinochet's implementation of neoliberalism if the intention were to make Chile communist anyway? Why wait until the collapse of the Soviet Union if they were going to stear it back to Communism anyway?

Neoliberalism was invented just after the 60's when American liberalism seemed to have corporations on the run - cars had to have seat belts, you couldn't dump industrial waste into rivers anymore, etc. These things don't seem like a big deal anymore, but the elites of the late 60's were freaking out. So the US Chamber of Commerce got together with the Department of Treasury and the IMF (somewhat misleadingly called the Washington Consensus) and decided to get involved in the political process to reverse this trend. Taking throwaway business theory from the Guilded Age before the rise of the progressive movement and combining it with objectivist philosophy as defined by Ayn Rand, neoliberalism seeks to unleash the unbridled power of business and to cut government (and thereby the people) out of the prosperity that results from it.

It is true that this leads to massive wealth inequality and everybody said so in the 70's - that's why it was given to Pinochet and Margaret Thatcher to demonstrate the merits of these economics abroad before they could push it here in America through the new lobby group expressly created for the purpose, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC - who are very much still active).

And it is again true that extreme wealth inequality has severe ramifications - as you say, one has only to look to World War 1 Europe or even 18th century France and America to see that.

But to say that the purpose of neoliberalism is to drive us towards Communism misses the point - these guys aren't Communists at all, they're greedy hypercapitalists who believe that the purpose of the world is to benefit them and that markets aren't free unless they're optimized for their purposes and their purposes alone. They're not Communist at all.

Neo-liberalism, firstly conservatism with liberal window dressing. That conservatism prevents Conservatives, and in turn, neo-liberals, from realizing, or ignoring, consequences of their actions. They are not communist, but it would spoil their world view if someone told them their actions would lead to communism down the road. Either blinded by stupidity or greed, they do not want to consider that Americans would actually realize how corrupt our government is and would finally revolt. Why do you think our military budget is so high. It's not because our government leaders worry about an external threat, but rather, an internal one.

Currently, our Republic is an ogliarchy. We have the illusion of electing our leaders, but their strings are being pulled by their corporate overlords. Such overlords would do anything to ti stay in power except treat others with respect and fairness. It's a sadism deeply ingrained in them. They have the monetary and political power to do it, and don't fear revolt because they know that they can unleash the US military against the modern revolutionary. Think not? Count the number of times the US military, state militias, and even local law enforcement have attacked American civilians. The Bonus Army fired upon by our own military: WWI vets that desperately needed the money proimised them because we were in a depression. The Memorial Day massacre that left a swath of death and injuries to unarmed men, women and children at the hands of the Chicago police. Kent State where the Ohio National Guard killed 4 unarmed students. Waco, another massacre but one with a difference: this was one time the massacred were able to fire back. Most recently, Occupy Wall Street. Non-violent protesters being maced, even while in custody.

These are the incidents that lead to revolution. Why do you think so many private corporate jets are in this country? When it hits, the men behind the curtain want a fast escape. They'll cut their losses only then, but have enough stashed outside the US to live comfortably and reestablish themselves elsewhere. And who do you think will step in to take over? If the revolutionaries win, they won't have the power to set up a new republic. Canada, as large as it is, won't attempt an invassion. The UK, nor none of the European nations, have the inclination. Japan lacks the military strength. Only China and Russia have the military might to step in.

And that's if the revolutionaries win. If they lose, picture martial law put in place for an "indefinite" time. We end up with a totalitarian government.

Revolutionaries will be imprisoned or executed. Many families will end up indentured to pay back the cost of the revolution. The CEOs will feel it safe to return and start utilizing their new slave labor.

Any way you slice it, trickle down, whether planned or not, will lead to a totalitarian government far removed from the democratic republic our fore fathers envisioned and established.

That looks fine (I think - bits of it are tricky to follow) but what you may not have considered is that from THEIR point of view, what they're TRYING to do is actually the other way around - to take a country just coming out of a despotic or totalitarian regime (which of course is how they see Communism) and to steer the aftermath to try to make a shining example of a revitalized economy out of it - and they want it so badly that no matter how many times they fail, they keep trying again. Think of Iraq after Saddam Houssein, or South Africa after the fall of Apartheid. These were all supposed to be text book exercises of neoliberalism at work.

Look, no matter how oligarchic America seems right now (and in part it is) the fact is that the neoliberals are still well aware that they need to market this brand of economics at a popular level. The most damaging economics in the past fifty years has yet to produce one success story AND THEY REALLY NEED IT. That's partly what Brexit has been about and that's partly what Donald Trump is going to attempt (the Clintons were no saints in this but for all their faults, they did not endorse a complete ideological purity to neoliberalism).

So when you make your forcast, first off remember that even in the venture capital community there's something of an ongoing power struggle in how to pilot this, and second that despite the appeal of neoliberalism to governments, governments are inherently results-driven in focus (Machiavelli lives on) and while governments will never run out of ways to manipulate politics to their agendas, trickle-down economics is just one of those ways and at that not one with a particularly good track record. In fact, the Austrian corporate elites have straight up told their government that they expect their taxes to be raised to bring balance to the economy - the rich there are not interested in destroying the base market demand in their country.

But where we both agree is that neoliberal economics has a very destabilizing effect on this country and people need to be aware that the consequences to that will be very grim, in whatever shape that should look like.

Agreed. In January, the country, for good or bad, gets the president they deserve. I'm curious to see how the electorial college handles it. That will prove most interesting. The voting is over, the recounts are done. Will the revolt occur over Christmas or hold off?

Personally, while I fantasized about the revolution endlessly when I was much younger, I'd very much like to hold off on the revolt while America resolves some much needed conversations that we're still struggling with. In particular I'm thinking of the continued bubble between the cities and the rural communities; the cultural barriers within America (which have always been there) are driving a great deal of this and it makes us entirely too easy to control, and if we could reconcile them before revolting we could accomplish much much more than a straight-up Civil War rematch.

It would be nice.