And it also isn't as if this current form of predatory capitalism is the way things have always been, either. My grandparents worked boring middle-class jobs: my grandfather sold cars and later managed a hardware store, his wife worked for the telephone company. That was sufficient for them to own a house mortgage-free, have a lakeside cottage, an RV, a winter place in Florida, take regular vacations internationally, and buy more unnecessary consumer gadgets than any 50 people could ever possibly need. All while amassing more in savings than they could ever spend. Today, those boring middle class jobs do not afford the same opportunities; you'd be lucky to afford a mortgage on a shoebox, and forget about all the rest.
Did this happen because people don't work hard anymore? Certainly not, productivity is at an all-time high. What happened is that labour (small l) had serious bargaining power for a couple decade post-war, which allowed the middle class to make significant gains in standard of living. And then thereafter, the ownership class* -- buoyed by favourable-to-them economic conditions -- mounted a very successful campaign to both reverse those gains and demonize the very idea that labour should be well-compensated. Rather than demand to be paid fairly for their work, labour should instead dream about the day they become ultra-rich themselves.
So now we have this stupefying cult of the ultra-rich, where it's not merely enough that we don't eat them (blubber in a ketamine marinade doesn't sound tasty, so I can't imagine people lining up to eat Elon anyway), but we're expected to treat them as ubermenchen, and any mention that perhaps it's unseemly that they have all the money is Attacking Capitalism. We lionize sociopathic behaviour...Andrew Tate is an icon among young men for telling them that, if they exploit the people around them as he does, they too can be wealthy (while he exploits those young men). It's all a bit grotesque.
*I'm hardly the first to say this, but the old divisions of lower/middle/upper class are extinct. There are two classes in the modern era: the people who own all the ****, and the people who do not. Increasingly, the people who own all the **** do not really make much of anything; they simply engage in rent-seeking behaviour, leveraging their wealth to create more wealth without contributing a damned thing. And everyone else, including well-compensated professionals, suffer for it.
