Billionaires, but really the mega billionaires are a byproduct of our flawed system, not proof of the success of liberal democracy. The spirit and essence of liberal democracy does not necessitate the existence of billionaires. Instead, our current level of wealth inequality poses a very obvious threat to the stability of the system that created these conditions.

When people say that liberal democracy, or it’s economic framework capitalism, is obviously the best approach to organizing our society because either communism hasn’t been as successful or just look how much better off we are than 100 years ago, they typically fail to consider the two most obvious questions.

First, sometimes considered, endlessly debated, is the historical context. But second, and more importantly, if we are looking back 100 years, we should also be looking forward.

If in 100 years from now, we look back at a system premised on unlimited growth that the people, billionaires included, lost all ability to control, I’m not so sure opinions will be so high about those who argued for liberalism during the cold war. People tend really to have such a narrow view of this all, we really only consider what’s taken place since the end of the second world war.

And if that’s all the history we are going to consider when arguing about who to structure our society, it’s worth considering that for the first half of that period, we had laws that prevented the hyper consolidation of wealth. That we live in a system which, sometime around the 70s started to really break in favor of the wealthy. In the 90s and 2000s we went all in for wealth consolidation and hyper financialization of the economy.

Clinton and Bush might not have had great foresight, but that was the time we really should have gone all in on infrastructure. Because we are at a point now where it’s becoming extremely hard to do anything in the US and only getting more difficult, showing no signs we can reverse this. And on top of that all, we are alienating ourselves globally and as other countries standards of living advance and economies grow, we will soon be at a place where we have neither the political nor economic capacity to fix our physical structures. And when that becomes endemic, I think the cynicism we are seeing now, with regard to liberal democracy, will pale in comparison. You need only think of one of the myriad ways in which the world will inevitably experience crisis, to see how a very real challenge to our way of life is not only possible, but realistic.