Comment by highcountess | Hacker News Reader

Comment by highcountess | Hacker News Reader

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I think both of you have a perspective that is well into a more advanced phase of a degenerative process than you or even most people realize, i.e., you describe a phase when the cancer had already been eating its way through the economy, as evident by the closing of local and legacy retail stores and collapse of community economies from early onset symptoms of cancer that were dismissed like saying “just feeling down” or “just a bit of a lump” or “I’m just tied”, or even worse, “it’s healthy capitalize competition to compete with the subsidized de facto slave love of China”.

What Walmart represented was really just a kind of acceleration of the cancerous growth and metastasis throughout the body of the economy, spreading to the bloodstream. The likes of Amazon only made things that much worse, a far more aggressive and parasitic malignant cancer, or maybe even HIV of humanity that spread even faster and harder, and was able to even overcome foreign immune systems that had previously been able to hold the Walmart cancer at bay.

I fully understand why people would see Walmart coming to a town that was likely also suffering as an early indicator and outlier to the de-industrialization /globalization that wouldn’t impact more consequential lower-middle class until a bit later and would largely be experienced as benefits by the upper middle class that you also likely occupy now and for a while now.

For context, this same process seems to be unfolding at an even more rapid pace in Germany right now as the industrial small business base is being massacred and that will have the same kind of devastating effects on the dependent small, family owned businesses and retail companies that have been a moat to the likes of Walmart, Amazon, and even by extension, the Ubers and Food delivery services and digital services that serve a deracinated and shattered population in the USA currently.

You're not wrong, but it's more complicated than that.

My town never recovered economically after the US Civil War. It was a fairly wealthy place before then because the main economy was tobacco plantations, which slave labor enabled. It literally had more residents in 1860 (including enslaved Americans) than at time since then.

A lot of the economic woes in the American South have very deep roots. A significant amount of wealth, pre-Civil War, was in the form of slaves. That was incredibly immoral, of course, but the economic effects of that "wealth" disappearing after the war was still a real thing. There were basically no large white landowners left, the farmers who remained were small landholders. And blacks ended up being a permanent underclass. They were also mostly farmers, but they were continuously undercut by de facto exclusion from the banking system. Also, public education as a whole was never great, even for whites, and for blacks it was pretty abysmal. The county next to mine actually closed its public school system for a generation instead of segregating, and the money that would have gone to the schools was instead embezzled by the county commissioners and funneled to a private white school instead.

Kneecapping your population like that has generational effects. The lack of investment in public infrastructure has two root causes: a significantly reduced tax base, and racism. Public services being available to everyone, that means you were taking money out of the hands of whites and using it to benefit blacks. And even though that is largely gone (imho), the effects of zero investment in public infrastructure isn't something that can be fixed quickly. We mostly missed out on the post-WWII economic boom for those reasons.

Even in the face of all of that, my county was doing okay up until the Carter-era agricultural reforms that incentivized large agricultural conglomerates and crippled family farmers. That, plus the interstate not going through town, pretty much doomed the place.

I think you’re right. I’m no economist, but all non-local companies are extractive in nature - i.e. more money flows to the corporate office (and out of the community) than would happen for a local company (though even local companies send money out to buy stock to sell). It’s easy to see why Amazon is so huge - streams of profit flowing to it from every corner of the country. Not much to do about it except to help small towns produce something of value so an equal amount is flowing back into town.

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