The subheading to the article, Are the American people obsolete? is:

The richest few don’t need the rest of us as markets, soldiers or police anymore. Maybe we should all emigrate

The article further goes on to say:

In every industrial democracy since the end of World War II, there has been a social contract between the few and the many. In return for receiving a disproportionate amount of the gains from economic growth in a capitalist economy, the rich paid a disproportionate percentage of the taxes needed for public goods and a safety net for the majority.

In North America and Europe, the economic elite agreed to this bargain because they needed ordinary people as consumers and soldiers. Without mass consumption, the factories in which the rich invested would grind to a halt. Without universal conscription in the world wars, and selective conscription during the Cold War, the U.S. and its allies might have failed to defeat totalitarian empires that would have created a world order hostile to a market economy.

Globalization has eliminated the first reason for the rich to continue supporting this bargain at the nation-state level, while the privatization of the military threatens the other rationale.

My friend ScottC put me onto this story.

Maybe this explains why trickle down economics isn’t trickling very much down our way.

I have been wondering for a while what happened to Henry Ford’s dictum:

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

I now see that the disconnection between the rich and the not rich is what has allowed them to renegotiate the contract.  (As if we had anything to say in that negotiation.  Maybe abrogation would have been a better word.)