Agreed.

Salary and bonuses is often so high that, for most of us, a single year's salary at a CEO level or fund-manager level would be enough to live in luxury for our entire lives. This tends to encourage risk taking - the CEO doesn't give a toss if the whole company goes down the drain in 2 or 3 years' time. He isn't looking to retire in 20 years' time with a gold watch, he is looking to get obscenely rich in the very short term.

Those who claim that these high salaries and bonuses are justified need to ask themselves whether corporations and the economy in general are better run now than when salaries and bonuses were more reasonable?

I like ConLang's stance on wine and beer.  The idea that one is privileged over the other because it is given an association with elite status is nonsensical.  Wine is the deep honey of life.  Beer is the barley of real feeling.  Both have their place in a world not defined by lines or demarcations that are artificial or defined by theft.

Yes, that it the point I was trying to make.  

In places like South Africa, where there is a vibrant wine-making culture, wine is a much more populist drink, and much cheaper.  

In America, though, most of what you are paying for when you purchase wine is the fact that you are drinking wine instead of beer.  Our beer-making culture is much more vibrant and popular than our wine-making culture.

Capitalism is just another set of hierarchies, and is therefore capable of forging its own state if necessary.  This is what we are seeing now, with massive de-regulation and anti-tax philosophizing among our government elites. You can't have government without taxes.  And you can't have hierarchy without government.  Each depends on the other and leads naturally to it.  Whoever is the boss makes the rules and you obey his government.  Therefore, it is useless to regulate government without regulating all hierarchy.

I like hyperbole myself when attempting to make a political point. (Do you want all the unique instances from your post listed one-by-one, by chance?)

One such instance is "betrayed revolutions". My favorite, easy-to-exaggerate subject of political conversation is self-identified "Communist" despots arising during the first half of the 20th century.

Also... I don't want to eat or drink or wear or generally consume the same things as any of you, ever.

But of course, except in a Totalitarian state, that will never happen.

It's a struggle to moderate the tendency of my thoughts to go on in "free association" mode on a good day.  That is life with ADHD for me.  I am sure some people would prefer an outline and three drafts, but that's not my natural style.

Extended-release welbutrin seems to do the opposite for me.

* Kapkao shrugs

My point is that what we call "capitalism" has always been an act of ruling interests that control the State.  Its actual historical evolution has been one of the bourgeois seizing power.