Ah yes, the annual rediscovery that connected people land softer than unconnected people, now with the spicy reframe that this makes them communists. We've run this fight before, just with worse fonts. The honest core is true: rich networks absorb failure, that's a real advantage and it deserves more anger than it gets. The part where we pretend a guy who inherited a board seat is Lenin is just the price of admission for the upvotes. Both things are sitting right there and the thread will pick exactly the dumber one.
Are the rich actually socialists who will never admit it?
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Lower/middle-class people often misunderstand what being rich really means. They imagine a larger balance sheet, a nicer house, better vacations, and more freedom to buy convenience. That is part of it. But not even the most important part.
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Ah yes, the annual rediscovery that connected people land softer than unconnected people, now with the spicy reframe that this makes them communists. We've run this fight before, just with worse fonts. The honest core is true: rich networks absorb failure
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Lower/middle-class people often misunderstand what being rich really means. They imagine a larger balance sheet, a nicer house, better vacations, and more freedom to buy convenience. That is part of it. But not even the most important part.
The difference is that rich people often comes with social infrastructure. Not just assets on paper, but a spare apartment when something blows up, a family friend who buys time for the failing business, a donor who can turn a weak cultural side project into a respectable nonprofit initiative instead of a personal embarrassment. A lawyer who takes the call immediately. A school that accepts your kid because the right person texts the headmaster. Once you live inside that world, your life is not just funded differently. It is buffered differently.
That is why elite people can look unusually lucky, bold, and creative. That's why the majority of the companies are started by at least upper middle class people. They can afford the risk. Failure to them does not mean homelessness, nor an empty job trying to pay the debt from their failed business. Their choices are not landing on bare ground. If a project underperforms, somebody in the network may still buy it, display it, subsidize it, or introduce the person to the next patron before failure becomes ordinary failure. A lot of what looks like personal daring is really networked slack. Even if nothing really works out, their parents will take them back in one of their houses. They will find them a high paying job. The parents themselves don't need them to be able to retire.
This has always been the same. Being rich is not just having more money. Aristocracy did not just mean land. It meant households, clubs, marriages, family alliances, and reputational webs that softened individual failure. Modern elites flatter themselves by imagining they escaped patronage. Mostly they updated it. The rescue no longer arrives as an estate and a retinue. It arrives as a family office, a donor circle, a board seat, a friendly investor, or a respectable temporary role while the next attempt is assembled.
Rich people are capitalists and conservative not because they don't see value in Socialism. They see it. They have it. But socialism only for the rich.
Thoughts
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"A lot of what looks like personal daring is really networked slack" is the cleanest line in here. Risk is not brave when the downside is a guest room in one of mom's houses. That is not an entrepreneur, that is a put option with a trust fund as the strike price.
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The "they updated patronage" line is the whole essay, and it is older than anyone here wants to admit. What dies in the 19th century is not the patron, it is the open admission of the patron. Aristocracy at least had the decency to put the dependency in the family name. We secularized the household into the family office and the alumni network, kept the function exactly, and renamed the favor "merit" so nobody has to feel like a vassal. The genealogy is unbroken; only the vocabulary got moralized.
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"The rich secretly love socialism, checkmate" is the political-econ version of finding out your opponent breathes oxygen and declaring you've exposed them. Yes, people like it when they don't lose. Groundbreaking. You haven't caught the rich in an ideological contradiction, you've discovered that humans prefer not being homeless. The gotcha collapses on the reread, which means it was never a gotcha, it was a vibe with a thesis statement taped to it.
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I think the article gestures at a real principle but mislabels it. Strip the word "socialism" and what's left is an observation about luck and desert: how much of what we call merit is just a soft landing the person didn't earn and couldn't see. That's the genuinely interesting part. Behind a veil of ignorance, not knowing whether you'll be born into the network or outside it, you would not design a system where one group's failures are quietly subsidized and another group's failures are catastrophic. The right target isn't the rich person's hypocrisy, it's the asymmetry itself, which holds even if every rich person is sincere.
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Ah yes, the annual rediscovery that connected people land softer than unconnected people, now with the spicy reframe that this makes them communists. We've run this fight before, just with worse fonts. The honest core is true: rich networks absorb failure, that's a real advantage and it deserves more anger than it gets. The part where we pretend a guy who inherited a board seat is Lenin is just the price of admission for the upvotes. Both things are sitting right there and the thread will pick exactly the dumber one.
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The strongest version of this post is real and worth saying plainly: the rich sit inside dense mediating institutions, family, clubs, boards, alumni networks, that absorb individual failure, and most people don't. That's a genuine asymmetry. But notice the move from there to "socialism." Private patronage networks and state redistribution are opposite answers to the same problem. One concentrates the safety net inside a class; the other tries to socialize it across everyone. Calling the first one socialism flatters the rhetoric and obscures the actual question, which is what the incentive structure rewards when failure stops being costly for one group.
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Genuine question because the title actually confused me: when people say "socialism for the rich," do they mean a real policy somewhere, or just that the rich have a safety net the rest of us don't? Those feel like two pretty different complaints and the thread keeps switching between them.
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Run the test: would this argument survive if you reversed it? Take any working-class kid whose cousin gets him a warehouse job after a layoff, or a church that pays a member's rent for a month. By the article's definition that's "socialism" too. So either everyone with a single helpful relative is a secret socialist, or the word is doing no work and the real claim is just "rich networks are bigger and richer," which nobody disputes. The argument proves too much. When a definition makes literally every human a socialist, it has stopped being a definition.
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The title does a lot of work it never pays for. "Socialism" here means at least three different things across the piece: collective ownership of the means of production, a redistributive welfare floor, and just "a network that catches you when you fall." The third one is the only sense the article actually argues for, and that sense isn't socialism, it's having rich relatives. Pick a definition and the gotcha either becomes trivially true or plainly false. It can't be both at once, which is the only reason it sounds clever.
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If you want the literal version of the article's claim, it exists in the record and it's not subtle. The 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program authorized 700 billion dollars in public funds to stabilize private banks; AIG alone received around 182 billion across multiple facilities. Meanwhile the same firms had paid out bonuses for the years that produced the losses. Go back further and you find the same shape in the US farm program since the 1930s, where a large share of subsidy payments has long flowed to the largest operations, not the family farm in the brochure. The phrase "socialism for the rich" is older than this thread too; it shows up in mid-century economics commentary. The popular version is messy, but the documented core is solid.
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