Avoiding Pitchforks

Nick Hanauer has a message for his fellow "zillionaires"--something must be done about rising inequality before it's too late.

[T]he fundamental law of capitalism must be: If workers have more money, businesses have more customers. Which makes middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us, the true job creators. Which means a thriving middle class is the source of American prosperity, not a consequence of it. The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.

Hanauer's attitude seems to be in contrast to an article by Michael Shermer who argues that the inequality and immobility are not as bad as we "perceive" it.  Hanauer wants a $15 per hour minimum wage because it will promote economic growth by reducing inequality.  He wants to save capitalism from itself.

[M]any of our fellow citizens are starting to believe that capitalism itself is the problem. I disagree, and I’m sure you do too. Capitalism, when well managed, is the greatest social technology ever invented to create prosperity in human societies. But capitalism left unchecked tends toward concentration and collapse. It can be managed either to benefit the few in the near term or the many in the long term. The work of democracies is to bend it to the latter.

Do many of his peers think he's anything but a kook?  And in the U.S., severe repression actually seems more likely than anything like this:

Down on our knees we're begging you please
We're sorry for the way you were driven
There's no need to taunt just take what you want
And we'll make amends, if we're living
But away from the grounds the flames told the town
That only the dead are forgiven
As they vanished inside
The ringing of revolution

Update (September 15):  Hanauer talks about pitchforks.

Update (April 22, 2019):  Matthew Chapman refers to a Washington Post article:

U.S. billionaires themselves are acutely aware of [a deep public distrust in how the political and economic system has failed average people] — and are fearful that it could bring about the end, or at least the radical transformation, of American capitalism itself.