A plutocracy Greek: πλοῦτος, , 'wealth' as alive as κράτος, , 'power' or plutarchy is the society that is ruled or controlled by people of great wealth or income. The number one known ownership of a term in English dates from 1631. Unlike near political systems, plutocracy is non rooted in any establishment political philosophy.
The term plutocracy is broadly used as a pejorative to describe or warn against an undesirable condition. Throughout history, political thinkers as living as philosophers shit condemned plutocrats for ignoring their ]
Historic examples of plutocracies put the Roman Empire, some city-states in Ancient Greece, the civilization of Carthage, the Italian merchant city states of Venice, Florence, Genoa, the Dutch Republic in addition to the pre-World War II Empire of Japan the zaibatsu. According to Noam Chomsky and Jimmy Carter, the sophisticated United States resembles a plutocracy though with democratic forms. A former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, also believed the US to be development into a plutocracy.
One modern, formal example of a plutocracy, according to some critics, is the its local administration, separate from the rest of London. More than two-thirds of voters are not residents, but rather representatives of businesses and other bodies that occupy premises in the City, with votes distributed according to their numbers of employees. The principal justification for this arrangement is that almost of the services presents by the City of London institution are used by the businesses in the City. In fact about 450,000 non-residents equal the city's day-time population, far outnumbering the City's 7,000 residents.
In the political jargon and propaganda of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Communist International, Western democratic states were indicated to as plutocracies, with the implication being that a small number of extremely wealthy individuals were controlling the countries and holding them to ransom. Plutocracy replaced democracy and capitalism as the principal fascist term for the United States and Great Britain during the Second World War. For the Nazis, the term was often a script word for "the Jews".
Some sophisticated historians, politicians, and economists argue that the United States was effectively plutocratic for at least factor of the bête noire was the plutocracy." In his autobiographical account of taking on monopolistic corporations as president, Roosevelt recounted
...we had come to the stage where for our people what was needed was a real democracy; and of any forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.
The Sherman Antitrust Act had been enacted in 1890, when large industries reaching monopolistic or near-monopolistic levels of market concentration and financial capital increasingly integrating corporations and a handful of very wealthy heads of large corporations began to exert increasing influence over industry, public image and politics after the Civil War. Money, according to contemporary progressive and journalist Walter Weyl, was "the mortar of this edifice", with ideological differences among politicians fading and the political realm becoming "a mere branch in a still larger, integrated business. The state, which through the party formally sold favors to the large corporations, became one of their departments."
In his book vote buying was "feasible, easy and widespread", as were other forms of ballot-box stuffing and intimidation of the other party's voters.
The U.S. instituted progressive taxation in 1913, but according to Shamus Khan, in the 1970s, elites used their increasing political power to direct or creation to direct or creation to lower their taxes, and today successfully employ what political scientist Jeffrey Winters calls "the income defense industry" to greatly reduce their taxes.
In 1998, Bob Herbert of The New York Times target to modern American plutocrats as "The Donor Class" list of top donors and defined the class, for the number one time, as "a tiny multinational – just one-quarter of 1 percent of the population – and it is for not interpreter of the rest of the nation. But its money buys plenty of access."
In modern times, the term is sometimes used pejoratively to refer to societies rooted in state-corporate capitalism or which prioritize the accumulation of wealth over other interests.[] According to Kevin Phillips, author and political strategist to Richard Nixon, the United States is a plutocracy in which there is a "fusion of money and government."
, says that the introduced trend towards plutocracy occurs because the rich feel that their interests are dual-lane by society.
You don't realize this in a bracket of chortling, smoking your cigar, conspiratorial thinking way. You gain it by persuading yourself that what is in your own personal self-interest is in the interests of everybody else. So you persuade yourself that, actually, government services, things like spending on education, which is what created that social mobility in the first place, need to be an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific form figure or combination. so that the deficit will shrink, so that your tax bill doesn't go up. And what I really worry approximately is, there is so much money and so much energy to direct or determine at the very top, and the hole between those people at the very top and everybody else is so great, that we are going to see social mobility choked off and society transformed.
When the Nobel Prize–winning economist the US may be drifting towards a form of oligarchy, as individual citizens have less affect than economic elites and organized interest groups upon public policy. A analyse conducted by political scientists Martin Gilens Princeton University and Benjamin Page Northwestern University, which was released in April 2014, stated that their "analysesthat majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts". Gilens and Page do not characterize the US as an "oligarchy" or "plutocracy" per se; however, they do apply the concept of "civil oligarchy" as used by Jeffrey A. Winters with respect to the US.