It is one thing to say that economic growth is not as high as it could be, and therefore the wealth, in absolute terms, that plutocrats have the potential to capture might not be going up to the same extent as it might have had a (relatively) more shared prosperity been enjoyed. Hard to argue with that.
On the other hand, and this is to my mind more important, relative to other classes within a society (and indeed, within this converging global community of which we increasingly are a part), the plutocrats are capturing an ever greater proportion of the overall total wealth creation (albeit the total being less than it could have been), as expressed in a number of ways. Among these ways are a globally rising gini, the casual addition of hundreds of billionaires annually to the ranks of the super rich at the expense of the poor, the peasants and the working classes of their respective home countries, and the increasing concentration of net worth at the top of the wealth strata in most of the liberal world.
That relative wealth, and not absolute wealth or prosperity, is what drives control over the levers of power, and allows the plutocrat class to buy off, in accruing measure, via control of the means of communication, the media, the means of production (via which the ability to decide which classes prosper and which are excluded) and increasingly the educational system, the democratic apparatus in each country over which they increasingly gain economic control. Stiffling shared growth for all is not a bug in the liberal economic system, but a feature.
Similar to the relative concentrations of wealth and power stiflfing growth for all, war tends to also depress, for a number of reasons, economic growth, but somehow, the plutocrats find a way to start them too. And not only start them, but find a way not to pay their share (via regressive taxes, and yes, even in France this is largely the case) and find the blood and flesh of the lower classes to fight them. And it isn't just the US either...'39-'45 may have cooled the European plutocrats a bit to the use of war to consolidate power over, among other things, natural resources, but it seems this cooling is fading, and countries where aggressive military intervention abroad was seen as anethema to common values begin to pursue wars of aggression without compunction.
This too is not a bug in the system, but a feature. Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
But what if everyone makes 3 millions? You still make the same money as the example above, but it doesn't get you the same lifestyle, not even close...
So it's not only important for the super-wealthy to keep accruing their income and assets, it is equally important for the rest of us, peasants, not to be able to catch up with them.
Yeah, I know, it's very basic, but it helps explaining some things, such as why middle class stagnation is not necessarily deplored by everyone...
As Dogbert says in a Dilbert comic strip (go ahead, call me a nerd :), "There's one thing about us, rich people: we don't like company." Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way. Americans think a hundred years is a long time.
In one way, I hope peak oil will be the "moral equivalent of [total] war" (damn stupid words, as war usually isn't moral at all, but...) and will lead to the kind of increased equality WW2 resulted in. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
