As the justifications for gross inequality collapse, only the Green party is brave enough to take on the billionaires boot boys
When inequality reaches extreme and destructive levels, most governments seek not to confront it but to accommodate it. Wherever wealth is absurdly concentrated, new laws arise to protect it.
In Britain, for example, successive governments have privatised any public asset that excites corporate greed. They have cut taxes on capital and high incomes. They have legalised new forms of tax avoidance. They have delivered exotic gifts such as subsidised shotgun licences and the doubling of state support for grouse moors. And they have dug a legal moat around the charmed circle, criminalising, for example, the squatting of empty buildings and most forms of peaceful protest. However grotesque inequality becomes, however closely the accumulation of inordinate wealth resembles legalised theft, political norms shift to defend it.
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