Historic examples of plutocracies include the
Roman Empire; some
city-states in
Ancient Greece; the civilization of
Carthage; the
Italian merchant city-states of
Venice,
Florence and
Genoa; the
Dutch Republic; and the pre-
World War II Empire of Japan (the
zaibatsu). According to
Noam Chomsky and
Jimmy Carter, the modern
United States resembles a plutocracy though with democratic forms. In 2018,
Paul Volcker, a former
chair of the Federal Reserve, stated he also believed the U.S. to be developing into a plutocracy. One modern, formal example of a plutocracy, according to some critics, is the
City of London. The City (also called the Square Mile of ancient
London, corresponding to the modern financial district, an area of about 2.5 km2) has a unique electoral system for
its local administration, separate from the rest of London. More than two-thirds of voters are not residents, but rather representatives of businesses and other bodies that occupy premises in the City, with votes distributed according to their numbers of employees. The principal justification for this arrangement is that most of the services provided by the City of London Corporation are used by the businesses in the City. Around 450,000 non-residents constitute the City's day-time population, far outnumbering the City's 7,000 residents. In the political jargon and
propaganda of Fascist Italy,
Nazi Germany and the
Communist International, Western
democratic states were referred to as plutocracies, with the implication being that a small number of extremely wealthy individuals were controlling the countries and holding them to ransom. Plutocracy replaced democracy and
capitalism as the principal fascist term for the U.S. and Great Britain during World War II. In
Nazi Germany, it was often used as a
dog whistle term for
Jewish people in their
antisemitic propaganda.
United States if it had kept pace with productivity. Also, the real minimum wage. Some modern historians, politicians, and economists argue that the U.S. was effectively plutocratic for at least part of the
Gilded Age and
Progressive Era periods between the end of the
Civil War until the beginning of the
Great Depression. President
Theodore Roosevelt became known as the "trust-buster" for his aggressive use of
antitrust law, through which he managed to break up such major combinations as
the largest railroad and
Standard Oil, the largest oil company. According to historian David Burton, "When it came to domestic political concerns, TR's
bête noire was the plutocracy." In his autobiographical account of taking on monopolistic corporations as president, Roosevelt recounted: The
Sherman Antitrust Act had been enacted in 1890, when large industries reaching
monopolistic or near-monopolistic levels of
market concentration and
financial capital increasingly integrating corporations and a handful of very wealthy heads of large corporations began to exert increasing influence over industry, public opinion and politics after the Civil War. Money, according to contemporary
progressive and journalist
Walter Weyl, was "the mortar of this edifice", with ideological differences among politicians fading and the political realm becoming "
a mere branch in a still larger, integrated business. The state, which through the party formally sold favors to the large corporations, became one of their departments." In "The Politics of Plutocracy" section of his book,
The Conscience of a Liberal, economist
Paul Krugman says plutocracy took hold because of three factors: at that time, the poorest quarter of American residents (African-Americans and non-naturalized immigrants) were ineligible to vote, the wealthy funded the campaigns of politicians they preferred, and
vote buying was "feasible, easy and widespread", as were other forms of
electoral fraud such as
ballot-box stuffing and
intimidation of the other party's voters. The U.S. instituted
progressive taxation in 1913, but according to
Shamus Khan, in the 1970s, elites used their increasing political power to lower their taxes, and today successfully employ what political scientist Jeffrey Winters calls "the income defense industry" to greatly reduce their taxes.
Post-World War II In modern times, the term is sometimes used pejoratively to refer to societies rooted in state-corporate capitalism or which prioritize the accumulation of wealth over other interests. According to
Kevin Phillips, author and political strategist to
Richard Nixon, the United States is a plutocracy in which there is a "fusion of money and government."
Chrystia Freeland, author of
Plutocrats, says that the present trend towards plutocracy occurs because the rich feel that their interests are shared by society: In 1998,
Bob Herbert of
The New York Times referred to modern American plutocrats as "The
Donor Class" (list of top (political party) donors) and defined the class, for the first time, as "a tiny group – just one-quarter of 1 percent of the population – and it is not representative of the rest of the nation. But its money buys plenty of access." Some researchers have said
the U.S. may be drifting towards a form of oligarchy, as individual citizens have less impact than economic elites and organized interest groups upon public policy. In the
U.S. Congress itself, more than half of all members are millionaires. A study conducted by political scientists Martin Gilens of
Princeton University and Benjamin Page of
Northwestern University, which was released in April 2014, stated that their "analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts". Gilens and Page do not characterize the U.S. as an "oligarchy" or "plutocracy" per se; however, they do apply the concept of "civil oligarchy" as used by
Jeffrey A. Winters with respect to the U.S. The investor,
billionaire, and
philanthropist Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest people in the world, voiced in 2005 and once more in 2006 his view that his class, the "rich class", is waging class warfare on the rest of society. In 2005 Buffet said to CNN: "It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be." In a November 2006 interview in
The New York Times, Buffett stated that "[t]here's class warfare all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." ==Causation==