Terrified plutocrats

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Have you noticed this?

Extreme inequality, it turns out, creates a class of people who are alarmingly detached from reality — and simultaneously gives these people great power.

The example many are buzzing about right now is the billionaire investor Tom Perkins, a founding member of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Perkins lamented public criticism of the “one percent” — and compared such criticism to Nazi attacks on the Jews, suggesting that we are on the road to another Kristallnacht.

It's the kind of thing that leads a solid citizen like Mr. Perkins to suggest this:

"But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How's that?"

Personally, I think that's terrific, sir. Because it means that the worst among us are not happy. It means they're terrified to be alive. Considering the leverage they have to make life miserable for almost everybody in the world, I would hate to see them enjoying themselves too much.

But there's something even more exquisite about this situation than mere, mundane karma. It seems that there's a relatively new meme going around right-wing circles about Obama, the coming Socialist Revolution, and guillotines, such as this (Achtung---very scary site!):

- The use of guillotines for “governmental purposes” was lobbied for and passed in the U.S. Congress

- The information we received is that 15,000 are currently stored in Georgia and 15,000 in Montana

- Are the beheadings by muslims today meant to desensitize us against U.S. Government beheadings in the future?

And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. – Revelations 20:4

Interestingly to me, his sort of musing isn't confined to the outermost precincts. Take this for example:

If the Left ever gets the revolution it wants, the owners of multi-million-dollar downtown lofts surely will be among the first to the guillotine. 

Perhaps they will be comforted by the words of Robespierre: “Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.”

Or maybe The Left will figure out that people who hold virtually all wealth and power on the globe are wetting themselves in Terror because they now have the world they've always dreamed of. And that they belong in Arkham Asylum.

More and more, I'm tickled by the idea of a Guillotine Lottery.