"The problem isn't that we have some inequality. Some inequality is necessary for a high-functioning capitalist democracy. The problem is that inequality is at historic highs today and it's getting worse every day. And if wealth, power, and income continue to concentrate at the very tippy top, our society will change from a capitalist democracy to a neo-feudalist rentier society like 18th-century France. That was France before the revolution and the mobs with the pitchforks. So I have a message for my fellow plutocrats and zillionaires and for anyone who lives in a gated bubble world: Wake up. Wake up. It cannot last. Because if we do not do something to fix the glaring economic inequities in our society, the pitchforks will come for us, for no free and open society can long sustain this kind of rising economic inequality. All highly prosperous capitalist democracies are characterized by massive investments in the middle class and the infrastructure that they depend on."
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Nick Hanauer in "Beware fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming", TED (conference) (August 2014)]
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Basic_income
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