Jon Lovett

How many children were working those gears?

Maybe she did.

But then, so it's like, oh, because they really earned it.

And the kind of underlying defense of it is like, well, Taylor Swift, by dint of talent, without exploitation, created more than a billion dollars worth of value.

And I think I largely agree with that.

But they are talking past the deeper argument, which is,

a system in which one person can accrue all that wealth.

Even Taylor Swift, she's protected by intellectual property law.

She's been able to take her vehicles on the roads and all the rest.

And it's not about the righteousness or the morality to me.

That's just not what I care about.

I think it matters a lot in politics.

It's a system in which

those benefits accrue so much is both wrong on the front end and the back end, the incentive structure and power structure of the economy, and then the tax structure on the back end.

And so whether billionaires should or should not exist, if a lot of them do, it is because something is fundamentally broken in the system and they have the ability to exploit that wealth that has kind of also wrecked our politics.

And like that to me is what makes it worth having.

Yeah.

But I think Democrats end up focusing on the tax side of it and not as much on the deeper structures that mean

individuals, like whether they have, whether they have a union or not, whether they have other protections, like let's say non-competes and things like that, all of which like kind of mean as, and as like more like all the productivity gains are sort of going up to the top, which means the individual has less negotiating and bargaining power than they used to.

And their dollar doesn't go as far because of all of our failures across like