Yeah, the gap between the wealthiest and everyone else literally does not matter at all, when it comes to ‘motivation for revolution’.

The overall level/amount/condition of poverty is what matters. And let’s be real, things are not nearly as bad in the US today as they were in France before the French Revolution. Not even close.

Fact is, if you magically bumped everyone up so that no one was making less than $75k a year, the wealth gap would be essentially identical to what it is now, because the gap between zero and 75k is nothing compared to the gap between 75k and hundreds of billions. But no one would be suffering in poverty, so would anyone care about the wealth gap, then? I seriously doubt it.

McDonald’s charging $10-20 for shit-tier burgers in some of the US:

McDonald’s is expensive now.

A double cheeseburger was a dollar a few years ago, sure. But it’s almost that much for a single nugget these days.

A hash brown is 3.50 at the one by my office.

It only takes about 3% of the population to push effective revolution. That’s still over ten million people. We might be getting close.

Ahhh so the Wall-E form of public control.

I can see it

Conspiracies happen in secret. There’s no hidden agenda, just the publicly-stated agenda.

Just offer free food and specially free opiates if they start a revolution. There’s many means to a end

And some of that money he has came from under-paying factory workers at his Fremont, California assembly plant. For a long time the hourly rate was $22 (not sure what it is now) but auto plants in the Midwest were paying that or better and he was paying $22 per hour in one of the highest cost of living areas in the country.

All those employees were given stock options as part of their total compensation which those other auto factories did not give to everyone.

All the early floor workers would be multi millionaires if they kept their initial stock, not counting using the employee program to buy more at a discounted rate or further employee incentives.

Anyone who joined a little after the Model S was being sold and the early model 3 time up to around mid 2020 would have around a quarter million if they didn’t aquire any additional stock.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Tesla as a company created the most employee millionaires of any recent USA company due to giving every employee stock as part of their compensation.

Early SpaceX employees are in a similar boat, but it’s harder to get rid of their shares since it’s private so it’s harder to quantify it.

Tbf, if he transfered that stock, the price of it would crash as the employees sold it. He’d have to do some kind of slow transfer over several years.

As if the US is currently a Democracy

America is a frog getting slowly heated in a pot of water. The only hope is to turn up the heat fast enough and high enough that the frog jumps out of the pot before it gets cooked

Yeah there is no single explanation for revolution. Looking strictly to wealth distribution is reductionistic at best. I mean, wealth distribution was arguably better in the U.S. in the 1860s than it was in the prelude to Revolutionary France and yet we had a Civil War lmfao. There are endless examples that disprove this rule. The reality is: popular unrest is extremely complicated, and the factors that lead up to it are varied with fluctuating levels of influence at different stages of development. Sure, perception of wealth is a key component… but its hardly an explainer.

Despite the current wealth inequality

It’s not “despite” the gap, because the gap itself does not cause poverty. If the poorest person in the US made $75k/year (in other words, poverty completely eradicated), the size of the gap would still be pretty much exactly the same (after all, the difference between zero and 75k is nothing compared to the difference between 75k and hundreds of billions, which is the current net worth of those with the most wealth).

After all, 50 years ago, the gap was significantly smaller, but the overall incidence of poverty was much higher.

Someone’s always going to have the most. And new wealth is constantly being created. And net worth is a valuation, a price tag, not an amount of cash (which is the primary reason it can go up as fast as it can–cash money simply can’t do that). Given these facts, expect this gap to always exist (and almost certainly continue to widen), even after poverty is eradicated.

Careful, bub, there are people lurking who think this quite seriously

please provide image

Maybe. There was occupy wall street and an assassinated CEO this last week though

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

Kurt Vonnegut

Rockefeller hid in his guarded home for years before he and Carnegie did their philanthropy PR stuff. Carnegie fled to England, and was putting out press releases that supported the Unions, while at the same time telling Frick to gun down the strikers. The gilded age was full of violence that created folk heroes to this day. Bonnie and Clyde, Billy the Kid, Pretty Boy George, Al Capone. These people were absolutely loved by the masses because they would destroy all the paper that said that old widow Johnson still owed on her mortgage. Bankers were beaten, hung, and shot for attempting to evict poor people.

We may have revered Washington, but since The Gilded Age, lots of us were taught by our grandparents and great grandparents that the greedy have no end to their greed, short of a bullet to the brain.

Was curious what that term meant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammon?wprov=sfla1 for anyone else who was wondering :)

Hah never thought I’d see that name on social media

Really, I think anyone considering themselves a Leftist needs to read False Witnesses and Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing.” Both are excellent examples of why people don’t change their minds when seeing indisputable evidence, they willingly go along with narratives that they find more comfortable. It explains the outright anger liberals express when anticommunism is debunked. That doesn’t mean Communists don’t do the same thing, but as we live in a liberal dominated west (most likely, assuming demographics) this happens to a much lesser extent because liberalism is that which supplies these “licenses” to go along, while Communism requires hard work to begin to accept. This explains the mountains of sources Communists keep on hand, and the lack thereof from liberals who argue from happenstance and vibes.

Poverty in 1700 is very different from poverty in 2000, which allows for significant, but not unlimited, skewing.

One could argue that the Church had been extremely efficient at manufacturing consent for centuries. It was still the case for most of French society in the late 1780s. It also led to a civil war between Revolutionaries and traditionalists (including peasants).

the propaganda machine seem to do its job better in the us

It’s one of the main reasons our owner class has sought to mock the French with “surrender” slurs and “freedom fries.”

They’d very much like the citizenry to forget Frances contribution to America and “western culture” over the last 200 years lest they get any ideas.