@rberger@hachyderm.io2025-07-19 18:48:22
"A society under “number go up” tends towards evil. The men and women behind an excessively high rate of return often make deeply sinful and immoral choices, little different than the Confederate plantation owners did in whipping slaves or lords in castles did when abusing serfs. That they do it with spreadsheets doesn’t make it better. (We even use old terminology: I know of several people in a large health insurance conglomerate who set policies to deny care whose nickname is “the three witches.”)
And that’s why Jeff Epstein’s story is so compelling, it expresses this evil in a way that we all understand. On Sunday, I wrote about the oddness of the story, how an elite sex trafficker convicted of procuring children as prostitutes was friends or associates with everyone from Trump to Bill Clinton to Larry Summers to Bill Gates. Epstein represents how elites live in one moral universe where evil bacchanalia is rampant, while the rest of us live in a different more normal one. Every society has elites, and there are always weird things that elites do. But America, and the West, have reached a point where there is increasingly deep resentment and cynicism about this divide."
#USPolitcs #EconomicInequality
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-number-go-up-rule-why-america
