Companies Catering to the Parasitical Class Are Doing Better Than Ever

Case in point is Rolls Royce, a company that is doing better than ever despite a relatively small consumer base of filthy rich people who want to show off their ill-gotten gains.

Not that I hate the cars; actually they are quite beautiful. It's just that the cars aren't made for the "rest of us" peons and are designed for the elite to show off and prove they really are better than the riffraff 99.999999 percent of the population.

Sometimes a short and apparently unimportant news item turns out to be a harbinger of major political and social developments. Such was the report of the record sales made by UK car manufacturer Rolls Royce over the past year. Britain’s most prestigious automobile brand, which now belongs to the German carmaker BMW, sold more cars last year than ever before. Although the sales volume amounted to “only” 3,630 vehicles, each of these luxury items cost an average of €400,000 (US$540,000).

Bentley, Rolls Royce’s leading competitor and a subsidiary of the Volkswagen corporation, also increased its sales last year by 20 percent to more than 10,000 vehicles. However, a Bentley costs “only” €170,000.

The Road to Serfdom Will Be Paved With Sinkholes

as there won't be a "few million overlords" from the financial elites but just a FEW billionaire families who control it all. That, of course is if trends continue with the worthless Congress, Supreme Court, and executive branch aiding and abetting the situation.

After all, the billionaire class will simply devour the millionaires and multi-millionaires so they can have even more.

They are parasitical and their extreme wealth serves no purpose at all for society. Tax laws should force them to pay right back into the system in order for the government to be able to stimulate demand and get the economy back on track.

However, the economy continues to be in the ditch because our "elected" officials are bought off and won't do one goddamned thing about it except try to force MORE "austerity" measures to squeeze almost all of us dry while they and their benefactors steal even more.

The Parasitical Class

is destroying the country by taking all of the wealth and buying off almost all of the politicians.

Michael Lind is almost always right in his analysis:

Low taxes on rentiers. In the late 20th century, the U.S. and a number of other capitalist countries made tax rates on capital gains lower than tax rates on wage income. This was supposed to encourage investment in productive enterprises, but in fact it merely provided the super-rich with windfall fortunes that have often been used for stock market and real estate speculation. Thanks to privileged tax treatment of capital gains, Warren Buffett complains that he pays lower taxes than his secretary, and Mitt Romney — the poster boy of rentier financial capitalism — paid 13.9 percent in taxes in 2010, lower than the combined employee and employer payroll taxes paid by low-income workers who pay no federal income tax (and not counting the state and local taxes that they pay). America’s rentier plutocracy has deployed campaign contributions to intimidate Congress into keeping taxes extremely low on those who make most of their income from investments, whether the investments enhance the American economy’s productive capacity or not.

Privatizing natural monopolies. The classic productive capitalist wants to found a company to provide a new, socially useful good or service and make money by sales. In contrast, the classic parasitic rentier wants to bribe the state legislature into privatizing and selling state roads so that he or she can make money without effort or innovation every time somebody drives and pays a toll. Not only progressives but mainstream conservatives used to agree that natural monopolies, such as many infrastructure services—water, electricity, transportation — should be either publicly owned or publicly regulated utilities. Today, however, some plutocrats, seeking guaranteed, recurrent streams of money for little or no effort, fund politicians and ideologues who favor privatizing or deregulating infrastructure and public utilities and cutting or voucherizing Social Security and Medicare, to force the elderly to buy financial products and costly health insurance from the rentier sector.

It's all about the greed.

As with parasites in the animal kingdom, they eventually kill off the host and eventually die themselves.

These greedheads, however, have politicians in their hip pocket and an ideology called "neoliberalism" that provides "intellectual" cover for their sociopathic behavior.

Like Death and Taxes,

like crime and disease, the wealthy have always been with us, and still will be with us even if they are markedly poorer in this shitty economy. Even so, the idea the rich are so because they are better or more deserving is going into the trash can, not least because it isn't true they are either.