How the inequality of wealth and power changes people. As technology changes we need to guard against the concentration of wealth and power that the Framers of the Constitution saw as destructive. In the case of the show, the wealth and power concentration comes in the form of life extension for the richest.
“Death was the ultimate safeguard against the darkest angels of our nature. Now the monsters among us will own everything, consume everything, control everything.”
The show also has a part where the son of an ultra rich, long-living “Methuselah” or “Meth” commits crimes because he wants his father’s respect.
Hmmm, sound like anyone we know?
“If there was one thing the Revolutionary generation agreed on — and those guys who dress up like them at Tea Party conventions most definitely do not — it was the incompatibility of democracy and inherited wealth.
With Thomas Jefferson taking the lead in the Virginia legislature in 1777, every Revolutionary state government abolished the laws of primogeniture and entail that had served to perpetuate the concentration of inherited property. Jefferson cited Adam Smith, the hero of free market capitalists everywhere, as the source of his conviction that (as Smith wrote, and Jefferson closely echoed in his own words), “A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural.”
– Stephen Budiansky, Sophrosyne, via The Economist, You Can’t Take it With You
