So what?
That's what makes this the land of opportunity.
Why complain about 2% holding much of the wealth if that 2% changes? Now if was an entrenched and impenetrable aristocracy I could see the problem.
So what if someone works hard and/or gets lucky, why begrudge them?
Someone else is always smarter, stronger, faster, better looking or, yes, even richer. As long as people can rotate in and out of that richer category based on hard work, talent, good ideas or even just plain luck I see no real reason to complain.
Fern
Just because there is some rotation among the top doesn't mean there's not a problem.
Try this on for size. Pretend that the top 2% WERE locked in stone, which you say is a problem, but the position of '#1' rotates among that top 2%. So what?
You ignored the second part of my post that made the same basic point.
There will always be a top 2%. The issue is, is their share of wealth and power reasonable, or dominant and harmful to the rest of society, reducing opportunity?
People in Latin American countries didn't hate the oligarchy for being at the top; they hated them for owning 95% of all land while the people starved unable to use that land to farm, for nothing more than the ruling families' protection of their own wealth and the top families' installation of regimes that would use the military and police forces to brutally prevent any political movement to get the masses doing better than the starving wages that kept the top families profits as high as possible.
Obviously, there's a road between where the US was a generation ago and those Latin American countries, but we've gone a good way down that road, with the rich skyrocketing in wealth while everyone else was flat - and critically, this power shift helps ensure that the situation will continue to get worse. The more the ultra rich get, the harder it is to stop the shift toward oligarchy. We already accept that our president has to raise large sums from the rich to get office.
The rich do best when their money gives them all the power. Democracy is to explicitly undermine the rich by giving everyone one equal vote regardless of wealth.
That's a class war in perpetuity, like it or not, as the interests of these classes are always in some conflict. The rich benefit (in the short term at least) from oligarchy, the people don't, period. Of course, either extreme can be counter-productive; execute the rich and divide up their possessions, and you kill the golden goose; enslave everyone, and you reduce productivity to far that the rich have a bigger slice of a smaller pie and a net loss.
Having an excessive concentration of wealth in the top 2% is a big problem whether or not there is some rotation.
Tell you what, the top 2% from now on will select our presidents and Congress from their own people, but they have to rotate every 4 years. That's ok, right?
What if in Iraq, every 4 years there were a national lottery where anyone could rotate in as the next brutal dictator? Would that be ok because it rotated?
If there is an excess concentration of wealth in the top 2%, that's a problem whether or not that top 2% rotates - mostly among, say, the top 5%.
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