Battle of the Billionaires

With the U.S. and other members of the G-7 targeting Putin's inner circle of billionaires to gain leverage over Russia's actions, we may be seeing what warfare in the 21st Century will look like. Information technology and an economically inter-connected world have made us more confident than even a decade ago that we now have the means to identify the most powerful oligarchs, where their wealth resides, and the buttons to push that can cripple their businesses and cause them financial distress. As nation states become dominated by a small number of super billionaires, this may become the primary means of engaging in conflict and resolving disputes.

This is an area, incidentally, where Karl Marx's "Das Kapital" and Piketty's "Le Capital" saw different outcomes. Whereas Piketty sees extreme inequality of wealth being eventually overcome by social pressures and political forces that take control of capital via taxation and democratization of ownership, Marx saw the ultimate solution in imperialistic regimes, warfare and violent revolution. Piketty sees little likelihood that the return on capital will decline very much in the years ahead, while Marx saw the increased supply of capital steadily reducing the rate of return towards zero, resulting in cut-throat competition that would bring nation states to use armed force to control markets and vie for territorial expansion.