Comment by jerf

I need to figure out some way to communicate how these things really work.

I think lots of people around here would agree that "the rich" are doing nefarious things. But people get real fuzzy on what those things really are and how they work. Like, the rich don't just stand around in a well-apportioned fancy study with a big wooden desk, smoking a cigar and ambiently shouting into the void "GEE I SURE HOPE THINGS GOOD FOR ME HAPPEN" before checking their pocketwatch for the time and pouring themselves an expensive alcoholic beverage... and then, in entirely unrelated news, it so happens that for no reason the government loosens some environmental restrictions that was bothering the billionaire, and some worker's rights get rolled back.

They hire people who know how to build organizations, and give those people money, and those people hire other people who know how to build those sorts of things, and then they hire lawyers and managers and line workers and people who know how to outsource and contract and do whatever it needs to get it done.

And none of these people are going to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times outlining exactly how they're doing all this. Even if they aren't actively trying to be secretive, they don't run around telling people all about it.

You can see a public and frequent example of how this works when a politician spins up a major election campaign, like for President or Governor. An entire organization of thousands of people with one explicitly political goal spun up, grown, expanded with volunteers, and then shut down again in a matter of months. It's much closer to how this stuff looks than the unexamined ideas people seem to have in their heads. It's no problem for a billionaire to spin something like that up for a cross-country law push.

Or, to put it simply, the way the rich accomplish their goals is basically with "conspiracies", specifically in the form of these sorts of organizations built to accomplish their goals. They don't just hope and wish. They use money to pay people to do things. If your view of the world doesn't have room for that, if your brain flips out at the idea that rich people pay people to do things, that's not a sophisticated and refined view of the world that is so much better than the ones held by those people who keep falling for those theories... it's hopelessly naive. Things mostly happen because people take actions. The way you and your buddies may get together to clean up a park on a weekend, a billionaire or a collection of them create organizations to do things.

That doesn't even remotely mean every conspiracy is therefore true. But things like a coordinated push across multiple countries for almost the exact same law is plainly obviously the result of some organization that has been built to accomplish that goal. That is by far the most likely outcome. No other one makes even slightly as much sense. I don't have to know what that organization is for that to be my most dominant hypothesis.