Once upon a time about 50 years ago, there was a (basically) democratically-run country where 10% of the people owned 90% of the country's productive capabilities (land and businesses), and the people kept electing "center-right" politicians who favored business. Because their bosses told them to.
It was a basically agrarian society, which means most people worked the land for the landowners. Others worked in factories for the business owners. That was the other 90%.
See below how this applies to US...
At some point, it got spread around that it wasn't quite fair that almost everybody was working for one of the few "owners", and that it would be great if there were the possibility that some of those workers might have the opportunity to actually become "owners". I think they got that idea from the United States of America, where it seemed that people could start out working for, say, Ford, and might have some possibility of someday BUYING a Ford.
During the 60's, the people finally elected a center-left guy named Frey, who started "rationalizing" land ownership & stuff like that: trying to make the "system" at least SEEM more fair. The trouble was, the system was SO unfair to start with that his reforms seemed "too little" and "too slow". But at least he made it easier to register and vote.
So in the next election, more people were ready to vote. And they had been seduced into thinking that reform could actually happen, and that they could personally benefit from those reforms. And they were frustrated at the slowness of progress so far, even with Frey. And so they voted for the guy who campaigned on the idea that "We can make our society more fair". And so they elected the "socialist" candidate.
Nobody was more flabbergasted than the "owners", who to that point had been able to convince the people dependent on them for jobs to vote for candidates & policies favorable to them, the "owners", or at least for policies that weren't too onerous on the "owners". In fact, they had been able theretofore to convince 90% of people to vote against their own interests!
But now, "the people" had won! The new president, thinking he had a mandate since an overwhelming majority had actually voted for him, started actually implementing the policies that he ran on: forcing land-owners to cede their lands for re-allocation among the rent-farmers, confiscating excessive & windfall profits from business owners, and stuff like that.
THINK PEOPLE! THIS IS WHERE IT BECOMES RELEVANT TO US!
Before all this hit the Supreme Court of that country, the landowners & business owners decided to make a stand against nationalization of their personal assets. How dare the government take their assets and spread them among the people doing the actual work!? They DESERVED to profit from the work of others, since they themselves were the "owners" of the lands & business enterprises, and therefore the total motivating factor of the entire country's economy!
And to prove it, this is what they did: they took all their marbles and went home. They closed their shops, they closed their factories, they closed their grocery stores, they closed their pharmacies, they closed their restaurants. They laid everybody off.
Everybody who worked for those guys was out of a job. And even if one didn't work for those top 10%, even if one had a job, the grocery store was closed & one couldn't buy food or other necessities. For ANY price, ANYwhere.
The "owners" didn't mind it: they could buy what they needed on the world market: they had plenty of resources in reserve. But it didn't take long before everyone else felt the pinch:
NO AVAILABLE FOOD.
As more & more people came to the end of their resources, the protests became bigger & bigger. The President couldn't affect the situation, and the army was called in. The country became "ungovernable". Eventually, the President committed suicide and the army installed a dictator. (And let's all thank the CIA -- yes, OUR CIA -- for that!) Thousands of people "disappeared", were tortured, and died, basically for thinking that their country should be more "fair", more just, maybe even more generous.
Their country is doing better lately, party because the dictator installed wasn't quite what the right-wingers had hoped, and land-reform did actually happen, and ordinary people there now have a better chance at a useful life -- in some ways, better now than we have in the United States.
But it took them 30 years to get here. And this is what truly scares me: what if the top 1% in this country take all their marbles and go home, as the elite did in Chile 40 years ago? Yes, there are numerically more millionaires in this country than in Chile 40 years ago, but not proportionately. If they all take their marbles & go home, if they all shut their doors they could actually leave America to starve, while they live off their foreign investments.
And then what will become of us?