Excerpt:
"Today's Plutocracy
So, who are the plutocrats of today?

Certainly, this group includes those who seek to blackmail state legislatures with boycotts and pressure tactics. But we find plutocrats using more subtle tactics as well.

For example, Amazon corporation now supports raising the minimum wage. This may seem like some great populist and magnanimous move on Amazon's part. But it is just what we've come to expect from plutocrats. In fact, Amazon's senior managers know that it can endure paying a higher wage than can Amazon's smaller and less capitalized competition. Smaller operations have fewer financing options to weather a cash flow crunch and are thus more financially fragile. Basically, Amazon is likely to support a wide variety of government regulations, because government regulations are anticompetitive. Amazon, of course, being the dominant firm, is motivated to crush the competition through state action. This is partly why Jeff Bezos came out in favor of a hike in the corporate tax. He's just hoping to stay on top, and while a tax hike is unfortunate for him, it's even worse for the competition that Bezos hopes to destroy through his political lobbying.

We see similar forces at work when plutocrats like Mark Zuckerberg call for more regulation of social media companies. Zuckerberg is speaking as head of the industry's largest, most capital rich, and most dominant firm. Now that he's on top, he's fine with more regulation, which will hurt small competitors most. (Social media companies, of course, are also happy to buy favors from the regime by deleting user comments and punishing users who annoy regime operatives.)2

But perhaps the most subtle form of exploitation practiced by the plutocrats occurs through the central bank, and this is why the Jeffersonians and Jacksons focused so much on the role of the central bank throughout the nineteenth century. Leggett, after all, is known for calling for "the separation of bank and state."

The advantages offered to plutocrats through central banks have been similar for more than two centuries, but in today's world these advantages can be seen in the fact that central banks are now in the business of pushing up stock prices for the benefit of Wall Street and large public companies. Thanks to the "Greenspan put," for example, the Federal Reserve has now for three decades been in the business of propping up stock prices. Now, we barely even notice when stock prices soar upward even during periods when millions of workers are laid off and national production collapses. "Stock prices must always go up" is essentially now federal policy. This in itself further helps explain why the plutocrats so often come out in support of higher taxes and a bigger regulatory state. As David Stockman observed, people like Bezos and the Wall Street and Silicon Valley elite:

have been made so insanely rich by the Fed’s egregious stock market inflation that they no longer care if their businesses are inconvenienced or even deeply harmed by schemes like the Biden [tax hikes]; and, worse still, have no idea about how real, sustainable wealth is generated or that free market prosperity is not at all a sure thing when the state becomes an unhinged wrecker of honest money, fiscal rectitude and financial discipline.

Why worry too much about taxes or regulation when you know you'll be bailed out by the Fed? Stockman continues:

By and large these new titans are not geniuses. They are bubble riders who were in the right place at the right time. And after years of the Fed’s massive inflation of financial asset prices they have become totally corrupted—politically, intellectually and otherwise.

In all likelihood, they don't even know how they got rich. But since they are rich, they conclude they must be very smart, and therefore they're now entitled to run the country; to punish people who live in red states, and run lesser business owners into the ground using the power of the state.

The Fed now buys corporate debt, and for more than a decade has been buying up assets in order to prop up what would have been the ailing portfolios of the nation's megabanks and investment firms. The Fed's monetary inflation leads to immense amounts of asset inflation not only in stocks, but in housing prices as well. This impoverishes first-time home buyers and renters, but benefits those who are already wealthy—and own lots of these assets.

It's all part of a well-established scam that the laissez-faire liberals identified long ago. The plutocrats hope to keep it going forever."