Free Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

“We are coming into collision with facts which there can be no mistaking. From all parts of the civilized world come complaints of industrial depression; of labor condemned to involuntary idleness; of capital massed and wasting; of pecuniary distress among businessmen; of want and suffering and anxiety among the working classes.”
    What George found most mysterious about the economic consequences of the industrial revolution was that its failure to deliver economic prosperity was not uniform; instead it had created a winner-take-all society. “Some get an infinitely better and easier living,” he wrote, “but others find it hard to get a living at all. The ‘tramp’ comes with the locomotives, and almshouses and prisons are as surely the marks of ‘material progress’ as are costly dwellings, rich warehouses and magnificent churches. Upon streets lighted with gas and patrolled by uniformed policemen, beggars wait for the passer-by, and in the shadow of college, and library, and museum, are gathering the more hideous Huns and fiercer Vandals of whom Macaulay prophesied.”
    George’s diagnosis was beguilingly simple: the fruits of innovation weren’t widely shared because they were going to the landlords. This was a very American indictment of industrial capitalism. At a time when Marx was responding to Europe’s version of progress and poverty with a wholesale denunciation of private property, George was an enthusiastic supporter of industry, free trade, and a limited role for government. His culprits were the rentier rich, the landowners who profited hugely from industrialization and urbanization but did not contribute to it.
    George had such tremendous popular appeal because he addressed the obvious inequity of nineteenth-century American capitalism without disavowing capitalism itself. George wasn’t trying to build a communist utopia. His campaign promise was to rescue America from the clutches of the robber barons and to return it to “the democracy of Thomas Jefferson.” That ideal—as much Tea Party as Occupy Wall Street—not only won support among working-class voters and their leaders, like Samuel Gompers, but also resonated with many small-business owners. Robert Ingersoll, a Republican orator, attorney, and intellectual, was a George supporter. He urged his fellow Republicans to back his man and thereby “show that their sympathies are not given to bankers, corporations and millionaires.”
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    George’s popularity is an example of the appeal of the rentier critique—a vision of capitalism without the cronies. That’s something we can all subscribe to. It is also one reason coming to terms with today’s super-elite is trickier than it was in the age of the robber barons. The crony class is, of course, still alive and well. But one of the striking characteristics of modern-day plutocrats is that, in contrast with their nineteenth-century predecessors, they are largely the working rich. Even today’s rent-seeking plutocrats work for a living—Carlos Slim or the Russian oligarchs owe their fortunes to rents they captured themselves, not to estates conquered by distant ancestors.
    We are mesmerized by the extravagance of the super-elite: the personal jet owned by hedge funder Ken Griffin, which is large enough to include its own nursery; or Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen’s 414-foot yacht, The Octopus , which is home to two helicopters, a submarine, and a swimming pool. But if their excesses seem familiar, even archaic, in other ways today’s plutocrats represent a new phenomenon. The wealthy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s era were shaped, he wrote, by the fact that they had been “born rich.” They knew what it was to “possess and enjoy early.” These were the great-grandchildren of the rentier elite John Stuart Mill had described half a century earlier: “The ordinary progress of a society which increases in wealth, is at all times tending to augment the incomes of