Regime Change in the West | Hacker News Reader

Regime Change in the West

lrb.co.uk

54 pointsPaulHoule31 comments

> The scenario following the crash of 2008 differed entirely. In the United States, policy ambulances were on the spot immediately. Under Obama fraudulent banks and insurance companies and bankrupt automobile corporations were rescued with huge infusions of public funds never available for decent healthcare, schools, pensions, railways, roads, airports, let alone income support for the worst-off.

In the form of loans. Far from a perfect program, but from Wikipedia:

> On December 19, 2014, the U.S. Treasury sold its remaining holdings of Ally Financial, essentially ending the program. Through the Treasury, the US Government actually booked $15.3 billion in profit, as it earned $441.7 billion on the $426.4 billion invested.[2][3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program

So they actually lost money compared to the treasury just not selling $426 billion in bonds.

Very rough calculation on my phone without looking up specific yields and dates: 5-year cost to the treasury for selling $426 billion in bonds is ~$443 billion (4% yield)

Ehh, if you're going to factor in opportunity cost then you must also account for the would-be impact to the overall economy had TARP not been enacted.

This isn’t opportunity costs, the government had to sell bonds to do all that because wasn’t sitting on cash.

I’m just saying that I don’t think “it was a profitable program” is true.

Factoring the overall benefits to the economy is obviously the right way to judge it and is (mostly) unrelated to its direct profitability.

I hear you but ISTM that "it was a profitable program" is more (partially) accurate than "the government just gave money away to big bad banks that should have gone into healthcare and education instead"

I haven't read anything from the London Review of Books before. But this seems excellent. Is this indicative of their general quality?

Yes. It's consistently very well filtered. This article is fairly typical, if you have the patience for such thorough long-form analysis.

Wow, it's quite rare to see such politically advanced content here! My most hopeful part wonders if it's because tech workers are starting to realize what side of the class war they should be on

Which side should we be on?

I see three sides. Oligarchs like Musk, Thiel, Zuck, Gates. Fortunate people with a few million after 25 years of toil, and the large masses yearning to move up to a richer group.

you missed the people in extreme poverty. also, I think most people yearn to move up to a richer group. Not all, but I would wager more than 50% in any of these "groups".

There are just too many who yearn to move up to the "finally afford food and house" higher group. I don't see them mentioned much in politics.

If we're trying to define bands of shared values in the wealth strata, there are more than three, and your first two, while mutually distant, still have more in common with each other than with any other bands.

> first two, while mutually distant, still have more in common with each other than with any other bands

Not really. People in the oligarch sphere have unimaginable power. If they need a law they buy it through politicians and lobbyists. If they need a law ignored just for them, same deal.

Working class people who've toiled 25+ years and accumulated a few million are still just working class people, with nicer cars and slightly bigger house. But zero political influence and no ability to shape laws or enforcement in their favor.

I draw the line at around $20m.

Why $20m? Some back-of-the-envelope maths: if you got a decent salary, say $250K, for 40 years and made some smart investments with it, offsetting your tax and living expenses, you'd have $10m. Double that for elbow room and that gives the extreme upper limit of what someone could reasonably get to by just working for a living. You could earn more, sure, but you'd be in the top 0.1% of earners if you did and we can safely exclude you as an extreme outlier.

It's also enough money to do pretty much anything you want to do: sail a yacht around the world? sure. Never work again and live in luxury? Obviously. Make a difference to other people's lives in a good way? Achievable.

But it's not enough money to upset entire political economies or buy power at the scale we've seen recently.

If I had to implement a wealth tax, and I think we should, then that's the cutoff I'd put it at.

If one must toil for 25 years, then such a person is still in the working class. A few years of high inflation, terribly high medical costs, damage to a house that insurance won't cover, etc, etc, can ruin even a "wealthy" person in the working class. The oligarchs, however, are living in another plane of existence than the rest of us.

Yeah, I agree. Plus tech workers in the past 25 years were very fortunate, lots of jobs, lots of stock market increase. It seems to be getting worse. It's not a permanent thing.

The "class war" is between those who must sell their labor in order to survive, and capitalists who must purchase the labor of workers.

Up to you to pick a side.

Reform of the economic system, I presume.

I think the whole two sides in a class war model is a bit dated. If you are thinking workers and owners of capital there is a spectrum between the Musks at one end and minimum wage workers at the other with most techies somewhere in the middle owning some property and or equity. The system should maybe be modified to make it fairer but the splitting into two side who fight each other thing doesn't really work.

https://archive.is/6oOD8

More, uh, technical coverage by Bruno Macaes

https://archive.today/latest/www.newstatesman.com/business/e...

>If a country can become prosperous just by printing money it will likely lose interest in producing actual goods. There could be a psychological dynamic at play here, but even in its absence there would always be a monetary mechanism.

>Does that mean ... no serious change in the existing mode of production can be expected?

The author is looking at traditional neoliberalism/Keynesian type changes but the huge change coming which he doesn't mention is AGI. I note the author is an 86 year old student of Marxism and probably not so up on that stuff.

I can't tell if people have started to genuinely believe this, or if those posts are still just ads by chatbot investors.

If I told you the truth, your faith in "people" would go down the drain.

I'm sorry but this is way off-topic for HN

Your assertion is hard to verify without context.

Can you explain why / point to HN guidelines etc.?

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm not sure it's way off the guidelines as in "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".

It's not very tech geeky though.

While it touches on a lot of political topics, the essay felt more about economics to me than anything else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com