Defeating useless rich people (Click here to read more)
Taming wealthy, unproductive "moochers" will require a populist campaign to stop them. Here's how we can do it.
Michael Lind
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In two previous columns, I argued that left and right alike are confused by a failure to distinguish productive businesses that sell innovative goods and services from "rentier" interests - landlords, lenders, copyright holders and others - which use their natural or artificial monopoly power to extract excessive tolls, fees and other recurrent payments from the rest of society, including productive businesses. The fees or rents extracted by these interests constitute a kind of "private taxation" which - rather than public taxation - is the greatest threat facing America's productive economy.
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Today America's powerful rentier interests, particularly those in the FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector, are mobilizing campaign contributions and paid propaganda to promote what I called the Rentier Agenda: low taxes on those whose income is derived from capital gains; the privatization of public infrastructure and the deregulation of regulated private utilities, to generate windfall profits for investors in privatized or deregulated agencies; and a macroeconomic policy that serves the interests of creditors, at the expense of slow growth and mass unemployment, rather than productive businesses and workers. Similar observations have been made by many on the left and some mavericks on the right.
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To counter the domination of America's rentier oligarchs, we need an Anti-Rentier campaign that would unite unlikely groups: owners of productive businesses as well as workers, populist conservatives and liberal reformers. An Anti-Rentier movement would distinguish businesses that make profits by providing worthwhile goods or services in innovative ways from rentier interests that passively extract exorbitant tolls and fees from the economy without adding any value.
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