It's where we're headed _if we let these assholes get away with it_. They have the money and guns, but we have the numbers.
A handful of guys can effectively rule large groups of people for a long period of time, if the said large group can't unite, can't help each other.
I've known of two engineers whose managers told me they would have fired them, but higher management wouldn't let them initiate the PIP process. The one case where I worked at the company was pretty bad. We had to shuffle the individual off onto makework jobs where they couldn't do much harm.
I don't think it's fair to blame this entirely on unions when it's the result of big businesses being too scared to follow a process that was given to them by the government. Unions mostly fight real unfair dismissals and only play a minor role in creating a chilling effect. Still, in practice it's hard to fire someone.
That is right on the money. The problem is many IT people believe in meritocracy to an absurd degree, a degree not found anywhere else.
I don´t know. Maybe we spend too much time alone in front of a monitor to understand what´s really going on.
Everyone who believes guns are some kind of savior or last-ditch protector is fucking stupid.
There is a reason why, during westward expansion, the first thing towns did when they got two nickels to rub together to buy bricks to build a church was ban guns.
There are so many real-world examples of guns being useless that it defies logic and belief that people cling to the myth.
There are so few examples of guns being useful that those examples are the irrelevant exceptions to the norm.
Every single valley in Afghanistan has a small village along the valley stream where every household has at least one automatic rifle. That is what a society saturated with weaponry looks like: paranoid, tribal, and rapey.
In the US, the second "the good guys" show up with their AR and wish.com tacticool gear and start to pose any actual threat, the bad guys will retreat behind fortified walls and fences and start dropping JDAMs.
And it got its ass kicked in Afghanistan. Trillions of dollars and countless lives later and a bunch of Pashtun tribesmen with AK-47s and RPG-7s have the country back, and a bunch of our materiel for our trouble.
Because the only thing on the planet more dangerous than a United States Special Forces operator is a man with nothing to lose.
(And what loss)
What you might do better to note is both of those conflicts consisted of the US invading someone else's home soil to effect change and being outlasted in terms of public interest - a public who at home were living peaceful, first world lifestyles.
Everyones little civil war fantasy is when the fight is happening on your home turf to start with.
I don't have any sort of civil war fantasy, but I think that holding out against a military deployment in-country until it became socially and politically untenable would be pretty reasonable.
There's many dictatorships which are considerably older then that, yet weapons are easily available or common - Iraqis didn't lack for small arms during Saddam's rule.
That's how war works now. It's always been true to some extent but conflict is just getting more and more asymmetrical with no obvious upper limit.
At some point the Houthi in a cave with a five hundred dollar DJI drone and rage in his heart is king in that world: the only way to lose is to care about something that hasn't already been taken from you. You'll never kill all of them. Not with a nuclear bomb.
Whereas the Houthis are a sufficient non-issue that shipping traffic treats them as an insurance cost, the US Navy's biggest problem is they'd really like laser rather then missile to cut that drone out of the sky (which is to say: they enjoyed Iranian backing meaning they were smuggled surprisingly capable antiship missiles, and they won't be getting many more of those now).
Because I can tell you, most of your countrymen do not agree. Most of humanity doesn't agree. And as long as there are so many examples -- from the French Revolution to Vietnam -- of people rising up against their oppressors, people will hope that should times become hard enough, they could do the same.
If it's the coup or something your own army may not be willing to trade fire with civilian groups but may still be willing to engage in.softer subduing efforts like arrests, water cannons, etc.
It's rich to call people stupid when you're missing the obvious point while engaging in a fantasy of all out war between civilians with guns and an army trying to exterminate them.
“But we have guns” is fantasy.
The Afghanistan war killed about 3500 U.S. & allied soldiers, and about 300,000 Afghans. [2]
The Iraq war killed about 5000 U.S. & allied soldiers, and about 1 million Iraqis. [3]
U.S. military power since WW2 can basically be summed up by "We can't win, but we can still kill you." If you end up dead, your side may win, but that's cold comfort (literally) for you.
The root of the discrepancy is the difference between winning as in annihilating your opponent and winning as in getting them to do what you want. Oftentimes, military force and lots of deaths actually just entrenches opposing ideology. Nothing like a common enemy that's trying to kill you to get people to band together. But you can still end up with a lot of dead people that are ideologically victorious. Always more people where they came from, and people may switch over to your cause.
Also, the huge irony of the Vietnam war is that by 1989, 15 years after the North Vietnamese "won", Vietnam was one of the most intensely capitalist countries on Earth. Because they realized that communism didn't work, and they'd all be better off with free trade and markets. Given the US's stated goal of preventing the spread of communism in southeast Asia, they would've been far more effective just letting the communists win and run the country for a few years and then dealing with the consequences of that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20241203211818/https://ucdp.uu.s...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
> U.S. military power since WW2 can basically be summed up by "We can't win, but we can still kill you." If you end up dead, your side may win, but that's cold comfort (literally) for you.
Some of them, yes. But even for those who do die: haven't you heard "give me liberty or give me death"? Many people do feel this way.
> Also, the huge irony of the Vietnam war is that by 1989, 15 years after the North Vietnamese "won", Vietnam was one of the most intensely capitalist countries on Earth.
Yet where is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie? Why do Vietnamese billionaires not run the government like they do that of America, and why does their government not have to kowtow to American business interests like Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea do? Because despite opening up their economy, their political system is far from a liberal democracy. You're making a false equivalence to try and pretend that the Vietnamese war was a no-op, that they should have just rolled over and accepted defeat like you're suggesting all the peoples of the world do.
This quickly falls apart in the US if we go civil war on each other. We are technologically fragile. If just a small portion of the people of the US went around shooting electrical distribution, fuel refining and NG compression facilities the US would have one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the last 50 years, maybe longer.
This said, there are a number of countries that would love to see us do this to each other.
What about gun violence against the machine? ;-)
That arc of history is fast coming to an end as the easiest pickings for the feudal class today are right here at home. There's less resistance because the natives think their leaders are too civilized and their society too well-informed to end up on the pointy end of shareholder interests.
The fundamental problem of communism is that everyone needs to play along, but the rewards for not playing along grow as more people do play along.
Absolutely new stuff is basically unrestricted. Go build, have fun, make money.
Intermediate stuff is partially state controlled, including cost, profits, pollution, and more.
Essentials are effectively state owned, cost controlled, and 'very stable'.
Also, the USSR was the first time it was tried. It succeeded some ways, but failed in others.
But sure. If you’re in Shenzhen or Shanghai it works «great». Until you step out of line ever so slightly.
Obviously living rurally is a lot cheaper, but this difference is _massive_. We're talking a 14x difference in daily income.
With China, you always have to look deeper than the surface level reports. Just like you would anywhere else, but particularly with China because faking it is accepted as long as it saves face.
Also, when I was I was born the entire country of China had a GDP/capita of about $6.10/day in 2011 dollars: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-p...
When it comes to the distribution, the best I know how to reach for is the Gini coefficient, on which measure China is better than the USA and worse than Germany: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/economic-inequality-gini-...
There's also this chart, but I don't know what search term I would use to describe it: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?Indica... (note this chart is in 2021 dollars, the first one is in 2011 dollars)
The US, too, has some fields of the economy that are almost entirely state owned. E.g. roads, K-12 education, public safety, transit. The existence of a few public industries does not make a country socialist.
Oh, and you know how Nazi Germany was the first time that Nazism was tried as well? It also succeeded in some ways, and failed in others. So I guess we should excuse that as well, then?
Will you now argue that those things are intrinsically linked to starting wars and conducting genocides? If so, you are going to need MUCH more than just "the nazis did that, therefore everyone who holds even one of those views must hold all of them". And just to make sure: my description of good points applies to the Amish as well, but I don't think anyone would accuse them of wars and genocides.
Reminds me of capitalism.
The combination of (1) checks and balances, (2) separation of money, religion, corporation, and government, and (3) regulation in moderation worked pretty well for around 200 years. Monopolies and labor abuses were mostly in check. Prosperity was widely shared. Churchill might have said it's "the worst possible system, except for all the others."
Around the mid 70s it started to go astray with the income gap and collection of obscene personal wealth and unchecked corporate powers. With the repeal of Citzens United, that was the end of it. We all know that playing defense against constant assault from an opponent with unlimited resources is a losing proposition.
If we do manage to oust the 1%, we could in theory reset to that decision point: with a few additional constitutional safeguards to keep money out of politics, strengthen ethics barriers for all three branches, etc, we might go another 200 years.
The idea that it was "very successful" basically comes from ignoring things like the Civil War, and the idea that it was "carefully designed" comes from building a fiction around the output and ignoring the process that actually produced it (in no small part aided by people viewing the after-the-drafting sales campaign of the Federalist Papers as if it reflected a real coherent rationale that went into building the system rather than a marketing campaign developed for a particular audience for an existing product.)
Who could vote was all over the place for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_voting_rights_in_t...
Civil War was about as far from "balanced" as you can get, and the problems weren't even on the axis of "hammer and sickle" vs "single megacorporation".
The New Deal was a radical change in the economic organisation of the USA, basically ended Laissez-faire. Before that point, there was enough social unrest that, for the people at the time, I think it wouldn't have seemed at all implausible the USA would have faced an actual communist revolution similar to the one in Russia, because of events such as e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
The USA didn't even notionally exist in 1770, but its pretty clear that the "200 years" thing was intended as 2x10^2 not 2.00x10^2 or even 2.0x10^2.
Read the first volume of Robert Caro's biography of LBJ, and you'll see that the militant farmers and tradespeople of Ohio were on the verge of declaring independent soviets when the New Deal began.
But plenty of countries did not follow down that part. There's no reason to assume this can't be stable, but you do need to limit the influence of big money and neoliberalism on your society.
Really? Transatlantic slavery by far the biggest labour abuse, then the company towns, then Standard Oil which was allowed to run amok for 30 years then broken up (which then consolidated into ExxonMobil and Chevron again). These are just off the top of my head.
The US from my point of view has been a puritanical, borderline genocidal, enslaving, cowardly and hypocritical, and yet nosy entity that discarded its inconvenient founding and history.
Its success I daresay has been entirely contingent on its remoteness from the rest of humanity (which fed into its exceptionalism narrative), and comparatively sparse population. By many measures the Roman and British empires were 'more successful'.
With the Roman Empire you are overlooking their slavery, genocide, etc, most of your critique applies. Britain at least outlawed slavery at home, but not in territories abroad, hence the slavery in the Americas and elsewhere
But...it didn't. I mean, not if "at home" means "throughout Britain" rather than "only in England and Wales".
"Borderline"?
Edit: before someone throws very strong platitudes at me again, I would like to see real-world examples. Because at least in my lifetime there have been zero consequences for people in power.
Edit 2: I've been banned from replying to this thread (lol, talk about power of the state). I guess I didn't define my acceptance criteria properly. But I thought it would be clear that the goal should be uplifting everyone not just shift the money around to someone else. That is what most of the revolutions mentioned in the replies are.
It’s easy to forget after 80 years of stable western democracies, but brutal equilibrium shifts do happen. There was a revolution every ~20 years in Europe between 1789 and 1917. And even during the 20th century, the history of much of the world is full of coups, revolts, and uprisings. See all the revolutions in ex-soviet republics, the Arab spring, etc.
So you can pick and choose between the American independence, the French Revolution, the revolutions of 1848, the Commune, and the soviets, to give you just a couple of examples for which you can find some documentation easily.
Again, am not a Trump supporter in anyway, but agree that when the wealthy keep getting richer while the blue-collar worker continues to struggle, this leads to discontentment and pushback.
I'd bet you that at least some are aware and just don't care. You crap on people long enough and they'll want to burn it all down out of spite. I suspect the eventual endgame here might be class warfare. Keep an eye out for more of these oligarch bunkers that are popping up.
Definitely. He tapped the anger and resentment of an underclass. The shame is that this underclass does not really see how he is harming them and how his politics benefit their old ennemies, the economic elite that’s turning into oligarchs.
> Most of the examples you gave of revolutions led to greater democracy and greater socialism, which benefits the blue collar, but ironically, in this case, the blue collar elected a autocratic conservative.
True. But examples of this also abound pre- or during WWII, from all the fascist regimes in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, and copycats such as Vichy.
Upheaval and chaos can lead to either progress or ruin.
People in power only have power in so far as others believe and enforce it. The emperor has no clothes.
So sure, not a given, but it’s a risk that goes up as conditions get worse.
> It surprises me that the monied elite seem to have so little awareness of what happens when they keep winning.
What happened is that the Russian elite ended up dead or penniless in exile. What happened after that is not really relevant to the lot of the blind elite of the ancien régime.
This is unsubstantiated by historical evidence. No new class of "hereditary bureaucrats" emerged to replace the nobility; there was remarkably high movement between workers and officials, and even up to the very end of the Soviet Union, high officials were former day workers who had worked their way up the ranks.
It's like a century of struggle before that whole situation resolved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C8%99escu#Death
EDIT: One could argue whether the United Healthcare CEO assassination meets the criteria, too.
So, even if you weren't factually incorrect as well as smug, what's your actual point?
Liberia (1980 coup & 1989–2003 wars): Americo-Liberian elite overthrown by indigenous-led coups; cyclical elite purges, executions, and exiles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Liberian_coup_d%27état
Argentine Military Junta (1983): generals faced prosecution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_the_Juntas
Philippines – Marcos Family (1986): Ousted by "People Power"; Ferdinand Marcos fled, family assets frozen, political exile: https://www.upi.com/Archives/1986/06/17/Judge-orders-Marcos-...
Romania – Ceaușescu Regime (1989): Ceaușescu and wife executed after rapid regime collapse; party elite purged: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_and_execution_of_Nicolae...
Rwanda (1994): Hutu elite responsible for genocide overthrown by Tutsi-led RPF, the attempt to seek justice overwhelmed their legal system so hard that it was itself criticised by Amnesty International: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide#Aftermath; internationally, there were also trials and convictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Tribuna...
Iraq (2003)/Libya (2011): External forces happened, Saddam Hussein got hanged, Muammar Gaddafi's death was the kind of thing people make laws to stop soldiers from doing.
And this year, that health insurance CEO who got assassinated, didn't they get their own legal strategy carved onto the bullets or something like that?
To reach the level of billionaire, it’s pretty much a requirement that you abandon all empathy and ethics.
What’s surprising is that nobody in their circle has educated them on the concept of a win-win. These people could be folk heros, universally loved and respected in ways buying a social media platform and banning all the haters will never accomplish.
1. The universe simply does not permit an arrangement of humans that isn't a hierarchy of exploitation and suffering.
2. There is a "natural" hierarchy which is also a just one, where good people deserve to exploit and bad people deserve to suffer, and of course I'm not one of the bad people. ("Just-world fallacy.")
3. Anyone who says don't need to build a Torment Nexus for anyone is a sneaky liar trying to trick their way upwards into a layer in the hierarchy they don't "deserve."
So it's not as simple as sadism or greed, they'll tolerate some being stepped-on as long as they've been convinced that the "right people" doing the stepping and the bad people are getting stepped on more.
A relevant free ebook from 2006: https://theauthoritarians.org
They are also a honeypot begging to be exploited by bad actors for whom life is a zero-sum game. Once a critical mass of those asshats show up, all of the trust that led to the greater efficiency and productivity breaks down.
Greater trust between good actors is efficient but opens the door to free riders. Lower trust is inefficient but handles bad actors. I think basically all of human history is a meandering line around this unstable equilibrium of trust.
That's just one example. There are plenty of rich people who got there fairly and created a lot of value along the way.
How is Roger Federer exploiting others? He played a competitive game, won a lot of tournaments, accepted a lot of sponsorship money. He is now a billionaire. Did he need to give up ethics and morals to get there? What kind of blame is that really?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._J._Hyett
Probably more the exception than the rule.
Nobody knows when.
But it's useful to think about how.
I think the inability for people to control themselves, while probably our greatest weakness, is also what often saves us. The greed goes too far and then there's a massive backlash (revolution).
Technology is trying to neuter any potential backlash though. I mean who can be bothered with a revolution while there's youtubes to watch and AIs doing everything for you! I'm still optimistic we'll smarten up eventually.
I suspect that’s why I’ve seen more serious monarchists than I ever have before.
After all, China has been following a market-based variation on a communist one-party state for quite some time. While it's certainly not the freest country in the world, today's US has started to lose any ability to claim a moral high ground by comparison (and arguably, past US couldn't either.)
Your perspective may be one mostly borne of indoctrination.
My perspective has nothing to do with indoctrination, but is instead born out of historical knowledge. Communism has been tried again, and again, and again, and each time the outcome was the same. Capitalism has also been tried, and has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system we ever came up with.
The existence of the ultra-rich doesn't bother me. I wouldn't suddenly be richer if people like Musk or Bezos suddenly popped out of existence; their lives simply don't impact mine. If anything, their existence serves as an inspiration for others to try for big dreams. Many of those will fail, some will succeed marginally, and a very small number will join the ranks of the ultra-rich - because they managed to provide a service that millions of people were willing to give them money. What does communism have to offer, in comparison to that? Equal poverty doesn't sound all that attractive.
Now, if you were to argue that these mega-rich people and their companies have too much power, we would have something to talk about. I see the solution to that in legislation though, not in the complete destruction of our society followed by a century-long dark age.
Sure, you're not indoctrinated. Keep telling yourself that.
Sounds like an argument against radical societal upheaval, rather than argument against any particular social or economic order. I think it's a good argument, but attacking alternatives to our current order with that argument begs the question: can we not have incremental change towards another order?
That has nothing to do with communism specifically, so isn't a very strong starting point for your argument. You're essentially saying that no significantly different system can stably replace the current system, which is of course an ahistorical claim.
> each time the outcome was the same.
What about modern China? It supports over 4x the population of the US. The US is currently falling apart politically and economically as it is, so whether its current system can scale to the level of China's is an open question, to which the answer is "almost certainly not." Is American-style capitalism only suited for smaller countries, then?
You're cherry-picking of facts to focus on and facts to ignore. You have a conclusion that you believe in as a fact, which forces you to carefully choose what you allow to enter your thinking on the subject.
I'm not actually saying that communism is the solution. But I am saying that your argument is not a good one against it.
I'd say most times it happened in history, significant bloodshed was incurred during a system change. Systems change as the result of revolutions and wars. People die, during those.
> What about modern China?
Modern China killed tens of million people during the Great Chinese Famine, which was caused entirely by communist policy, so I don't think your argument is working as well as you were hoping. And if that's too old for you: the jury is still out on how many Chinese died during the covid lockdown, but it's likely to be substantial. In the West, a lockdown meant you weren't allowed to leave your home. In China, it meant they welded you into your apartment, with whatever food you had available.
> You're cherry-picking of facts to focus on and facts to ignore.
Whereas you are completely blind to the inevitable outcome of the policies you pursue.
What facts do you think I'm ignoring? Is it the fairness of Stalinist Russia? The freedom of North Korea? The economic progress of communist Ethiopia? The intellectual prowess of communist Cambodia? The equality of China? What am I overlooking that turns murderous communist regimes into great places to emulate?
Pray tell, how many people in capitalist countries died due to capitalism?
None of them! It was always the individuals' responsibility! /sarcasm
(Aside: we know just from the lack of access and $84k for Solvaldi alone is causing 5 million dead per year, and rising. And that's just a single hepatitis drug. And that's not even touching diabetes.)
Maybe you feel that a pill that costs a few bucks to produce should be sold for that same price. In that case I'd like to remind you that in this case, a private company spent BILLIONS on medical research, without knowing if any of it would ever pay off. If you just take their one succesful product and distribute it for free, they won't bother trying again.
How many great medicins came out of communist countries?
I'm not a particularly big fan of massive companies in general; it's a concentration of power that I think is dangerous. At the same time, who do we have to blame? Who ordered absolutely everything of Amazon, who took all those Uber rides, who slept in those airbnb rooms? If we, as consumers, had the good sense to spread our money around a little, we wouldn't end up with companies like that.
I'm not opposed to the ultra-rich, assuming of course that they stayed within the boundaries of the law while becoming so. They worked hard, they made smart choices, and they profited from it. And so did we - otherwise, why give them all that money? What I am opposed to is the outsized power they wield thanks to their fortune, and if that power gets misapplied, I have no problem with breaking those companies up into multiple smaller entities.
Not to mention the fact that the 100 million figures includes Wehrmacht soldiers or terminated fetuses as "victims" of Communism to inflate its numbers.
If you really think that there simply aren't enough resources for everyone, that makes the gluttony of the wealthy so much worse.
I remember the howls of 'Death Panels' when Hillary Clinton brought forth a single payer universal healthcare back in 1995 as first lady.
I also remember the counter republican / Heritage foundation's plan of a health marketplace. Perhaps you heard of Romney are or ObamaCare? Same plan.
And about death panels? Initially it is a discussion of rationing a limited resource. But the death panels we have now are purely based upon greed of the insurance companies. Delay, Deny, Defend. That depose wasn't so much a bad idea, if we look at human suffering/death as a loss of GDP.
These deaths due to delaying and denying are capitalist deaths.
> Maybe you feel that a pill that costs a few bucks to produce should be sold for that same price. In that case I'd like to remind you that in this case, a private company spent BILLIONS on medical research, without knowing if any of it would ever pay off. If you just take their one succesful product and distribute it for free, they won't bother trying again.
First, most new drugs come out of the public higher education in the form of studies and papers. And Reagan changed the rules allowing universities to make bank on the backs of students.
Since they were publicly funded, they should be owned by the public.
But they're not. The rights get bought by a monopoly maker, who gets nearly 2 decades of protection. Who cares if those drugs could save 5 million per year if reasonably priced. Monopoly control gets monopoly pricing.
Now specifically Solvaldi.. It costs $1000 a pill, once a day for 12 weeks. $84k. Insurance won't pay for this cure, since treatments are cheaper. However it costs $300 to manufacture with chemical supplies. We could save 5 million people a year here, with easy and cheap access to cures. We, as a society, do not value life. We value 'how much I can extract from your life'.
Four Thieves Vinegar Collective talks about this on their videos https://kolektiva.media/w/6iqzQtGqGSKbeFndBkEcm7
> How many great medicins came out of communist countries?
Playing GOTCHA games with 'name something or you're invalid' is boring, and only shows not knowing some name on demand. And that's also being completely ignorant of the propaganda here in the USA.
But one wide area the USSR invested in is macrophage research, as a whole class of drugs. And that's not 1 drug, but a whole class.
But seriously, how many needless deaths are caused by capitalism? And yes, I'm looking at: lack of housing (homelessness), overpriced medicine, overpriced doctors, hyperprocessed and/or food that would not be legal elsewhere, terrible products that create obscene trash, extreme consumerism leading to unmitigated climate devastation.
But hey, a billionaire got another 10 million in the time it took to write my post.
Citation needed. Solvaldi, the drug we are talking about, was developed by Pharmasset. I see no evidence of university ties, and I find it hard to believe that a university would let such a money maker slip out of their hands if they had any kind of claim to it.
Even at a mere $300 per pill, you are still looking at $25K for a single treatment, which is well above what most people can afford. So would excluding millions of people from treatment be acceptable if the pills were priced at ingredient cost?
As for the bacteriophages, it perfectly supports my point: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9sxcko/was_t...
"However, just three years later Eliava and his wife were accused of fantastical crimes and murdered at the personal direction of Lavrentiy Beria, chief of the NKVD. After this d'Herelle was so terrified and disillusioned with the whole Soviet experiment that he never returned from a trip to France... ...Eliava had the misfortune to fall in love, and then sleep with, an opera singer that Beria was obsessed with. Though academic opinion suggests that Beria may have been simply demonstrating to the military and/or still influential Georgian Bolsheviks that even a Hero of Soviet Science was not safe from his machinations."
Communism at work, doing precisely what I told you it does. If the head of the CIA murders a random civilian, it is, thankfully, still a crime in your capitalist society.
And in opposition to your list of capitalist ills I will put the communist equivalents: no medicine, no food, and no products. And even then they managed ecological devastation, such as the lake Karachay area...
Now, think about it why we were conditioned from the ground up to forefeit any connections with other people and basically bared of forming high trust communities.
It's largely why Americans are so, so fat compared to other nations.
My bank account does.
Seriously though, I don't think this dynamic arises when people have choices, sure, but specifically in the land of job seeking the relationship is brutally asymmetric a lot of the time. People need jobs. One need only to look at the terrible current state of "send us your CV, also fill up our form in our website, also yeah we might sell your info".
If the cost of interviewing drops to close to 0 for a company, we can expect to see interviews being part of the process along with everything else. Juniors have it bad and they might just get it worse.
You don't need money? NEED money, like your life depends on money to keep surviving? 'cos most people do and don't have your luxurious options.
Go back a hundred years, you can see what went on when they did. And the government was right there with them.