There is a fundamental tension between extreme wealth and the very possibility of democracy. That\u2019s because extreme wealth is always an extreme power<\/p>\n
The stock market listing of SpaceX has led to an outpouring of celebration, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Yet those who rejoice in Elon Musk<\/a>\u2019s fortune surpassing the $1tn mark need to be reminded of a simple and vital truth: the mere existence of trillionaires is a major political and economic problem, probably the defining issue of our time.<\/p>\n Simply put, there is a fundamental tension between extreme wealth and the very possibility of democracy. Extreme wealth is always an extreme power. It\u2019s the power to stifle competition, the power to shape public discourse, the power to influence policymaking, the power to buy elections, the power to stall social progress.<\/p>\n Gabriel Zucman is a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics, a summer research professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and founding director of the International Tax Observatory. He is the author of We Need to Tax Billionaires.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is a fundamental tension between extreme wealth and the very possibility of democracy. That\u2019s because extreme wealth is always an extreme power The stock market listing of SpaceX has led to an outpouring of celebration, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Yet those who rejoice in Elon Musk\u2019s fortune surpassing the $1tn mark need … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74935\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}