A great read of a man getting high huffing his own farts -- like all of our billionaire overlords.
No insights, no rebuttals, just a quick off-the-cuff insult with no substance whatsoever.
And it's still a better place than most.
I think the anger comes from those that do remember a time where people/corporations seemed fairer.
I get the anger from the original poster.
It's not that we hate our country. It's the opposite. We are tired of billionaires/corporations pushing us around.
I'm still a bit miffed over the way Uber bought that proposition. I don't like it when wealthy people take out huge low, or no interest, loans in order to not pay taxes, or set up 501c3's with less than 1% of the sacred money going back to the country that provided a relatively safe, fair enviornment to let their entrepreneurial ideas flourish.
I hope we never lose that angst.
Are we better than most corrupt places I will never visit--yes.
You're blaming corporations and the wealthy for what is fundamentally a problem with the government and the electorate, and in effect giving up the game and accepting they are actually in charge.
The main complaints I see are that minimum wage hasn't kept up with a living wage, that health insurance is too expensive, and that education is too expensive. But what I think people actually want is a safety net for the basics: health care, shelter, food, education, etc. The narrative of being "pushed around" implies that somehow those basics must come from giant companies. They shouldn't because it's exactly what gives them the leverage to push people around.
The people can elect a government which provides these basics for everyone. Then we can find out the fair value of an Amazon warehouse worker, when the worker is showing up for their own economic improvement instead of to simply not die in poverty. Amazon can continue to act in their best interest, but they'll be forced to pay higher wages by workers who don't need the job for basic survival.
It is possible to organize these types of changes with massive grassroots efforts.
> the way Uber bought that proposition
That proposition was about classifying drivers as employees vs contractors.
They ran an aggressive ad campaign, but they didn't engage in any illegal practices to buy that law. They played by the rules.
But why does this classification even matter? It's because employees are required to have employer-offered health insurance plans.
In other words, the real problem is that your employment and health care are linked. If we had national health care, nobody would care if they were a contractor or employee. In our reality though, it was worth $200MM to Uber to fight the measure, and they're acting legally and rationally for their bottom line, because that's the framework our government has created for them.
If you look up the history, there was a salary cap for workers to prevent inflation during WW2. But health insurance was a new product and employers offered that as an incentive instead of higher salary, because companies will always find a way to compete. When the salary caps went away, employers were already offering health coverage for years, and it became normalized throughout the system that health care is provided through an employer.
Why a wage cap that set all this into motion? “We shall be compelled to stop workers from moving from one war job to another as a matter of personal preference; to stop employers from stealing labor from each other” -- FDR (https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fireside-chat-4)
FDR may have have had good intentions for the war effort, but that salary cap set the model for all of these non-salary "benefits" that we have today.
> I don't like it when wealthy people take out huge low, or no interest, loans in order to not pay taxes, or set up 501c3's with less than 1% of the sacred money going back to the country that provided a relatively safe, fair enviornment to let their entrepreneurial ideas flourish.
I see this as the same class of error. Also, it's going to be impossible to prevent people holding Bitcoin from borrowing against it, for example. We can't look at these problems as trying to close loopholes, especially when it's technically impossible to enforce them.
Maybe we should re-think if taxing investments even makes sense at all. There are probably more enforceable ways to pay for our collective needs besides income and investment taxes.
Every time we enact taxes or benefits that are supposed to be "targeted", we cause a lot of collateral damage. We need broad solutions that work for everyone, like universal health care, universal basic income, changes to what we tax, and how we manage our currency.
I believe the goal should be to enable a type of capitalism where everything is operating with more efficiency and nobody is getting hurt or homeless in the process.
> I hope we never lose that angst.
I hope we do. Some day we will achieve a system where workers have a true safety net and are free to bargain with their employers without risking their lives. Then the angst should be pretty much gone.
I’ve been visiting these parts of the internet ever since PG started writing his essays. There is marked shift in the attitudes here, from celebrating success to hating it.
This is of course not limited to SFBA. The phenomenon has been, and continues to be, endlessly analyzed by journalists, culture critics and social scientists. A common theme is that of decadence, that only a society as rich as the US can begin to afford to hate itself.
Perhaps it's only in disfunctional societies, possibly ones who've seen a lot of harm from communistic rhetoric, that they think in simple terms that those making a larger pie are still morally better than those who shrink the pie in the name of equality or morality.
Perhaps that dichotomy isn't as relevant in the U.S., where the pie is already large and many further methods of expanding it don't actually benefit society and the metric of assuming those with a large slice must've also expanded the total size of the societal pie isn't holding up to scrutiny.
My critique of your your critique aside, I agree that I don't personally feel under the thumb of billionaire oligarchs, though they clearly do unduly influence our legislative process to benefit themselves to a higher degree (corruption) than in Northern and Western European nations which we comapre ourselves to in terms of degree of liberty.
There is a silent majority that still hopes for and celebrates the success of ambitious fellow patriots.