Life During Class Wartime
tbray.org
tbray.org
I think there are many practical ways to solve it, and would love to see more proposals out there. Instead I tend to see nihilism or division.
It sounds trivial but the effect to various tax evasion strategies is very important. It's also something that really ought to be uncontroversial. Read the book!
I disagree with TFA's idea that a wealth tax is the best solution. IMO wealth is easier to hide than income, it's just that nobody bothers right now with there being no wealth tax.
Exceptions to this rule come about for specific reasons. Before the industrial revolution, there just wasn't that much power to go around. Everyone was working their land for sustenance, and the rent-seeking nobility extracted some percent of production because that's what there was to extract. When the industrial revolution came, those who figured out how to exploit it became the new nobility and worked their employees to the bone. It was only after actual, bloody, war between the factory owners and the employees that we got labor rights, which were a truce agreement. And that agreement's been steadily declining since Reagan. It took a while because the beneficiaries of the labor rights era were able to hold onto their wealth and pass it down to their children, but now we're back in the same factory feudalism situation again, but with different technological status.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-new-exploiters-9d8a0684...
Until the black death came in the 1300's and killed an estimated 30–60% of Europe's population, and now the nobility had nobody to rent seek or even to work their land.
So then, for the first time ever, the surviving workers gained bargaining power as landowners (lords) competed for labor, leading to high cash wages, better working conditions, and more freedom for peasants, because the feudal lords hadn't yet figured out how to replace the peasants with slaves, H1-Bs and illegals from across the planet.
So according to history, including your post-WW1 example, the only times peasants gained bargaining power was when millions of them died through world wars and global pestilence.
Looking at recent unfolding history, "There's something very familiar about all this" -Biff Tannen
the surpluses of the agrarian farmers meant that the pharaoh lived a life vastly different from anyone in his kingdom.
Not that above commentator is meaning that.
But many "thought leaders" i.e. Jordan Petersen play around with similar motte-and-bailey - "hierarchies are natural" (examples with lobsters, apes, whatever) --> "existing hierarchies should be preserved" (not defended in the argument but implied).
Probably some downvoters are reacting to the structural similarity, although taken in good faith i think above commenter makes a fine point about the historical pattern of periods of equality being short lived and brought about by great intentional effort while sliding back to inequality seems to occur all of the time.
The problem remains that the US voter consistently demonstrates they don't actually care about these problems though, compared to using the state to intentionally inflict misery on subgroups they don't like.
The most radical thing the current administration proves is how unimportant taxes and cost of living actually were to its voters, given the broad support it retains despite overtly and continuously raising or making both those problems worse (read cares as: "understands" - for a group which wouldn't shut up about it, apparently significant changes aren't crippling enough to get them to change their vote in many cases).
This happened because he’s consistently harnessed the power of the popular vote. Just today he flexed that muscle in Indiana.
I’m distraught that my fellow Americans keep falling for his circus barking and he’s made it clear that norms don’t matter and gerrymandering may be the end of the republic. But you can’t deny the power of the regular persons vote after him.
There isn't actually one monolithic class of billionaires that all share the same interests and want the same things; and even though an individual billionaire can be personally influential, they simply do not have the power to unilaterally determine the political direction of a country. But regardless of what political direction a country does go in, there's probably some billionaire who is more or less aligned with that direction. So anyone who dislikes that political direction can point to the nearest-ideologically-aligned billionaire and blame them for influencing politics in that way, despite the fact that if the tables were turned and their side was winning, someone else would point to whatever billionaire aligned with them as an evil influencer.
Um, no. His popularity comes from a willingness to actually do the things that many other politicians said they were going to do, often while campaigning, and never did.
well, as long as the policy changes in question can be implemented by executive order. good luck doing anything that requires actual legislation.
> The problem remains that the US voter consistently demonstrates they don't actually care about these problems though, compared to using the state to intentionally inflict misery on subgroups they don't like.
what does this mean, exactly? it sounds like you're trying to say that things would have been different, if only those pesky voters hadn't voted for Trump. but they _did_ vote for someone other than Trump in 2020, and that did very little to affect the issues mentioned in the article
What people are actually experiencing is not wealth inequality, but cost disease. Vital things (housing, healthcare, education) are more expensive - and that's mostly the fault of state action.
1) You have to get it out of your head that it is enough when everyone has X standard of living. It isn't. It's enough when less than a critical threshold of the population is dissatisfied, and that dissatisfaction can come no matter what the median/lowest standard of living is. This is just how societies work, uniformly.
2) Money is a ledger supported by a social contract. Spending wealth in ways that erode the social contract is bad. I think we can all agree 500M dollar yachts, empty luxury apartment buildings, and buying up shorelines in populated areas are all bad looks, and therefore, erode the social contract. The wealthy really need to step in and police each other socially here, if they want to continue being wealthy.
We already do. Most of what governments do is reactionary to dissatisfaction.
> then changing laws because those people are "dissatisfied" seems kind of arbitrary
It's the opposite of arbitrary. Governments generally rule via power invested in them by the populace. Doing things that alleviate dissatisfaction is a survival tactic.
> dissatisfaction is kind of the human condition.
This is why building a rational and cooperative society is important, because they are the cure for misplaced dissatisfaction. That being said, historically, governments aren't stable, and that is, in large part, due to some of your points.
Neither restrictive zoning, nor the administrative bloat in academia that caused tuition to skyrocket, were lobbied into existence by people like Bezos and Musk. They are result of tireless lobbying of relatively unimportant people seeking their own little rent.
While, let's be clear, administrative bloat in academia is a very real issue, pointing to that as the true root issue is far more nebulous. Student loans being made non-dischargeable by bankruptcy meant that universities could afford to raise tuitions because lenders would be happy/ier to fund those loans because they will get their pound of flesh, even if it takes decades longer than designed.
Taxing the extremely wealthy basically does nothing to decrease the property values of this class of people en masse, and decreasing their property values en masse is precisely what it would mean to make housing more affordable for more people.
"But CHILDREN will SCREAM here!" shouted one such lady at me when I dared express my opposition against her petition, which demanded a stop to a "megalomaniac" plan to build approximately fifteen apartments half a kilometer away.
"You were a child once, too," I said.
"Sure, but I was A GOOD BEHAVED ONE, NOT LIKE TODAY'S BRATS!" at that time, she was positively screaming as well.
M'kay.
The situation in the US may be different, but the few YIMBY blogs and articles I have read mostly described their efforts as an uphill battle against progressive politicians who were certain that development leads to gentrification and gentrification is bad. Given that the YIMBY movement originated in California, this may just be an aftereffect of Californian politics. But in general, it is blue cities and regions that are known for very restrictive zoning policies.
Medical care is getting better, insurance is required to pay for more and more things, but that drives up insurance costs.
In my county, fire sprinklers are required in all new houses.
Costs go up, but at least, in theory, you're getting something in return.
You're welcome to blame the state. Without those actions, things would be somewhat more affordable. But it seems pretty clear from the data on inequality that inequality is a much bigger factor in bidding up living costs than the fact that I need to install sprinklers in my house, even if sprinklers are a very large cost relative to my income.
That’s not cost disease. That is wealth inequality killing people.
One of the pillars of capitalism is that the entire economy is more efficient when decision making power is dispersed as close as possible to the people making economic decisions aka what they buy.
When we have ended up in a situation where a handful of people are making all the economic decisions because they have all the money, there is no functional difference between that situation and a command economy.
If you’re a believer in capitalism as a tool to eliminate scarcity you should view the existence of billionaires(adjust for inflation) over the longer term as policy failures that are eroding capitalisms ability to create more and more.
It's natural that things are less equal now that we're not farmers or hunter-gatherers. Economies of scale will massively enrich those who take build them.
Sometimes it is claimed that inequality is a problem because the rich will control politics. But populism is surging and the rich seem to have a harder time controlling politics than ever, largely due to the disintegration of the print/tv media.
Education returns the investment to a nation at around 9%/year. Transportation infrastructure (especially if it's not only for roads in dense urban centres) also has a decent ROI. Investment in science, fundamental research that most private entities don't have the risk appetite for, has a massive ROI for a nation over time.
Providing public services and safety nets for a society also free up humans to take risks such as starting businesses, if you know you will be able to survive with dignity even if it all crashes and burns you are more inclined to try out that business idea instead of being stuck at a bad job. It makes bad jobs also more unattractive, requiring better salaries which reduces the gap between the haves and have-nots, this lowers crime, increases social cohesion, etc.
What exactly is the benefit for society of not taxing wealthy people out of 2% of their wealth? They mostly don't use that wealth to invest in risky ventures, they rely on banks for that.
How 5k will make a difference?
This reminds me of when Bernie Sanders was asked why it's OK for him to be a millionaire and he said something akin to "If you write a popular book like I did, you can be a millionaire too." Well maybe if you reinvent electric cars and space travel or build a company that ships you almost anything you can think of within 2 days then you can be a billionaire.
I recognize there are still people who are food insecure, and I think it's an abomination how people are suffering (many poor rural black people in the south don't even have access to basic plumbing and end up with diseases like hookworm), but making wealthy people into a boogeyman just seems like an emotional argument so much of the time.
If there is no public transportation available, an old Toyota Yaris is also enough to have a comfortable commute.
I also live in a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, and attributing these phenomena to pathological inequality badly misdiagnoses the problem. Most visibly homeless people in wealthy west coast cities are severely mentally ill in ways that prevent them from living a normal life or even living peacefully with other people without some kind of institutionalization, which local authorities are reluctant to do because there's no nice way to institutionalize people.
In some places, it's possible for people with a moderate amount of dsyfunction to be able to scrape together enough resources in order to rent cheap, low-quality housing; but in wealthy west coast cities there is a massive housing shortage that is downstream of decades of underbuilding, so all types of housing are very expensive. The underbuilding was and is mostly driven by large numbers of middle-class homeowners who primarily care about the negative externalities of construction and density affecting the place where they live and own their own homes.
Neither of these problems has much to do with extremely wealthy people, or wealth inequality in a general sense.
Agree on the underbuilding.
I don't know if we should call this inability to make basic, smart financial decisions a mental illness or not, but it's something. And these 2 people aren't/weren't even what I would consider visibly homeless. At least as long as you didn't see them living in their car behind a convenience store.
Starting with the framing that housing is just too expensive makes the problem simple. You build more housing, or you subsidize housing for these people, or somehow just inject money into services for them so they can get back on their feet. But if that's not the core issue for some or many of these people, how do you actually help these people? How does a society help people who are incapable of handling their own finances? That's where the hard questions begin.
For this subset of people, I don't see how you can help them without managing their finances for them. Even if you completely manage their finances, how do you help them if they just quit every job they get?
I never really thought about it much before them, but I think pretty often about the problem. How do you help someone who can't be helped? Even if you gave them free housing and a weekly allowance, they would still find a way to not have money for food before the next week.
Non-mentally I'll homeless people are rarely "street people". They live in a car or with friends or in a shelter. Plenty of them have jobs.
There is indeed a spectrum of homelessness from temporarily distressed to broken beyond repair. There's different actions for the different factions.
I live in the Portland OR metro and believe that the issue has spawned the Homeless Industrial Complex that thrives on extracting money to "help" but are incentivized to keep the problem going for their livelihood.
I'm not unsympathetic to their plight (I had been effectively homeless a couple times in my life). It bothers me to no end how this problem is mismanaged.
IIRC, most people who obtain "homeless" status only keep it for a short time, and don't live on the streets during that time.
You'll get very different statistics if you count transitions into (or out of) homelessness over some window, vs systematic point-in-time counts of current homeless status, vs point-in-time counts of people camping on the street, vs trying to measure QALYs.
"Requiring hospitalization more than once a month, on multiple occasions in a year".
And that number, per HUD, is 22%.
If you want to look at "untreated mental illness" in the homeless, now you're above 50%.
But "untreated mental illness" isn't the same as "mental illness that requires institutionalization" which is what the OP is saying.
Additionally, a lot of mental illnesses can be reasonably managed with proper medication, and in my mind very, very few actually require institutionalization. But we as a country can't even get behind the idea of universal healthcare for non-homeless let alone homeless people. Somehow institutionalizing them seems more feasible or reasonable than just covering their medical care?.. I don't get it.
I do think there's a Venn diagram around severely mentally ill and untreated mentally ill that might require more intensive care. There's also the complexity that drug use and abuse is a method to cope with the emotional pain of homelessness (as one of my instructors said, "if my existence was reduced to fishing rained-on food out of trash, brushing cigarette ash off of it, sleeping and shitting in alleyways, often without something to effectively wipe with, you better believe I'd be on a fast path to taking some drugs to numb that"), or for "self-medication" of said untreated mental illness.
What data have you seen which doesn't support it?
You see this question a lot when discussing drug usage among homeless. The percentages of addicts is undeniably high; we know this from point in time counts, for example. Some people take that as proof that homelessness is the fault of the homeless: they made the bad decision to take drugs, and that’s why they lost their jobs. But there’s also a lot of data showing that people are more likely to become addicted as a way to cope with street life.
And if, in fact, losing your home is something that can happen relatively easily in part because of wealth inequality, we’re right back to the original assertion.
Underbuilding is for sure another factor. It’s just not the only one.
And this is relevant for any institution at all that tries to house such people, including the state. If the state provides some kind of basic housing with electricity, what happens when the people living there rip wires out of the wall so they can sell the scrap for drug money (a major reason why most landlords don't want to rent to really poor people)? Will someone prevent them from doing that (i.e. institutionalization), or will the state itself evict that person from their housing and allow them to live as a homeless street person?
Sources? This just sounds like cope from a wealthy individual who wants to feel better about not helping the problem.
That said, my experience in a urban area on the west coast has given me many examples that support this notion that it's not just a housing problem. Indeed many of the local governments own attempts to house the unhoused fail in no small part because the unhoused create conditions incompatible with staying housed.
Furthermore there is a steady drip of examples in regional news that raise serious questions about the efficacy if not motivations of the judiciary, politicians, law enforcement and local beuracracies charged with addressing the problem.
I do believe that housing costs are a major part of the problem but I also believe that treating the population as if they have no obligations to society is a major and fatal mistake to the whole enterprise. For one the policy approach has invited contagion by not addressing the population of unhoused that cannot or will not uphold the most basic aspects of the social contract. For two, it turns away a large number of people that would otherwise be sympathetic to the cause.
You would know more about the situation in west coast cities better than myself, I’ll admit.
What I take issue with is how the anecdotes closely align with certain political talking points - it rings an alarm bell or two, and begs for more concrete sources. Personally, I couldn’t find any reliable sources saying one way or the other.
Anecdotes are highly susceptible to confirmation bias though, along with other biases. It’s one of the reasons propaganda is so effective: our preconceived notions influence how we see and interpret the world around us. This affects me too, I’m not immune to propaganda (2015 me thought the idea of a Trump presidency was “funny” because of the memes and I thought he had zero chance of winning, for example - don’t worry, I’m not American so no votes were cast!)
I appreciate you taking the time to respond with such detail, and you seem to be writing in good faith, but I think this issue is a lot more nuanced than (paraphrasing - not trying to directly attribute a quote to you) “the homeless in west coast cities are there because they cannot function normally in society”.
It’s a sensitive topic for me personally because my family was one of those “sheltered homeless” families for a few years when I was still single-digits of age, and growing up in severe poverty I also met many other homeless people. I can guarantee you, if wealth inequality were not so severe then many people wouldn’t have fallen into drugs and mental health crises to begin with.
Many folks see it as a “chicken or egg” problem, when really, we all know that struggling to make ends meet and being evicted is highly stressful and traumatic. Wealth inequality is the root of many of these tragic stories, and it’s unfair to label everyone in that position as if they’re fully to blame for their situation in life.
But, again, I’m not American and my culture is much more socialist and cooperative. So maybe the unhoused in America truly do fit your descriptions, and I simply have no idea what I’m talking about. :P
In any case, thank you for your thoughtful and insightful replies.
Is that _why_ they're homeless? And are you aware of "drug induced schizophrenia?"
> which local authorities are reluctant to do because there's no nice way to institutionalize people.
There are no _cheap_ ways to do it. There are _tons_ of nice ways to do it.
> so all types of housing are very expensive.
And you're speaking of an area that has weather patterns that are conducive to living outside.
> Neither of these problems has much to do with extremely wealthy people, or wealth inequality in a general sense.
Immediately? No. Proximally? Yes. Obviously.
I think almost everybody would be better off if taxes were something like 1% of total assets rather than off the top of your income.
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But I'm not sure if your historical claims are accurate. I believe a lot of taxes were a fraction of the expected yield of land, which is more complicated than just "taxing wealth vs. income". Yes, the taxes would go up if you owned more land, which sounds like a tax on wealth. But the imputed tax base would be based on historical yields (income) because the quality of the soil would vary (which also could be construed as a tax on wealth because higher quality soil meant land might be worth more per acre). It was also based on the weather during that growing season, if yields were down in that area then taxes would be lower that year, which sounds more like an income tax than a wealth tax.
You also said "its only been about 120 years since wealth and income were different":
The Christian tithe that became de jury under Charlemagne in 779 A.D. was a strict 10% tax on land yield each year (~income tax) but other empires and lords used fixed quotas (~wealth tax), and records exist that these could have brutal effects during years where weather resulted in lower yields.
There was the 600-year long sales tax on salt in France, which definitely wasn't a wealth tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabelle
In 1899 the UK instituted a 10% levy on annual incomes over £200, with a graduated rate for incomes between £60 and £200. Income taxes had a hiatus from 1816-1842 but has been permanent since the "Income Tax Act of 1842".
The Mit'a (Inca Empire, Pre-1532) taxed individuals "time". Which I think most people would consider kind of an income tax - it's literally paid in labor. Adult men had to spend a certain number of days each year working on state projects - like building roads, farming state lands, or fighting in the army. They didn't have currency. Their economy was based on centralized planning, labor taxation (mit'a), and state redistribution of goods.
The Saladin Tithe taxed revenues at 10% in 1188.
No thanks. Any discussion about tax reform has to start with government spending otherwise it's not serious. Nobody wants to give away a slice of their net worth to pay for bullshit wars and ballrooms.
I'd say almost the reverse. What we need most in terms of "tax reform" is to move away from thinking about taxes as solely a means of funding government operations, and towards thinking about taxes as a way of directly redistributing wealth. That is, the revenues of a wealth tax could simply be given to the non-wealthy as direct payments (possibly in the form of refundable tax credits). Unavoidably there will be some overhead, but there doesn't need to be anything for the money to be "spent on"; it can just be straight-up given to different people than those who paid it.
And if you disagree with that look at social security which is supposed to be your money but clearly it is not.
The vast majority of people in America are already doing this, because their wealth is entirely derived from their income. Your complaint isn't relevant to the discussion of wealth vs income taxes.
Derived is not the same thing. Not even close.
Then why stop at 1%? Why not fork over half of your possessions to the government every year and let them spend it for you, if you trust them so much?
And by the way we already have a wealth tax. Its called inflation.
Aka put your wealth at risk or watch it disappear.
And the larger point is that runaway govt spending makes it disappear faster.
We also have mountains of loopholes through all of these.
If you can afford a tax attourney your outcomes will be far better than those who cannot.
The problem is, and always will be, what happens to me is I am out of work. No one wants to force people to liquidate assets they might need to work, live, etc in order to pay an asset tax.
Then you get to the dividing line of, but what about the ultra wealthy? Well, sure, but then you write an insanely obtuse tax code to try and capture that wealth while leaving everyone else alone and the targets are highly motivated to find loopholes.
Progressives intuitively understand that it’s not worth the hassle to try and means test entitlements yet seem to miss the fact that trying to manage a confiscatory bureaucracy would have the same issues.
It would be a cat and mouse game but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Like how funding the IRS appropriately increases government revenue.
Bureaucracy = jobs, at least. I'd rather that than having it concentrated at the top.
The other major issue with "free money" is that it is purely inflationary, unlike wages which offset most of their price pressure by providing a commensurate amount of goods/services. When you hand everyone a million dollars the price of everything just goes up, both because there's a flood of money and because there's even less incentive to produce something to buy with it.
I think there's any compassionate argument to be made for helping the indigent, but easy ideas like "taking money from job creators and value producers to pay for needles and degeneracy" are never going to work at all.
It's a bit of a trope to say that billionaires are hoarding wealth via financial shenanigans when all of their wealth is tied up in job and value creation.
The us govt wastes by some estimates 30% of its budget. Trillions annually. Have to start with the waste and fraud. Empty daycares are not a good use of hard-earned tax dollars and have a massively pernicious effect on the society. They're not taking care of kids or paying teachers. Just pure inflationary greed.
On the other hand, multiple jurisdictions have run trials of UBI (universal basic income) and unless I misread the reportage, the results have been good.
Much can be said about the problem of government waste, and it certainly is a problem, but there's an underlying assumption in this kind of talk, which I'd like to attack. That assumption is: "people are poor because the government taxes them too much, and wastes their money". Republicans in the US run and win on this platform again and again.
The problem is that it's simply not true. Government wealth has been falling for decades[0] -- nations are increasingly rich, but governments are increasingly poor. I don't even need to include a source that shows effective tax rates have been falling for the same period (no surprise -- that's _why_ governments are so relatively poor). As nations have continued to get richer, most of that wealth has been concentrated in the hands of an increasingly small group of private individuals.
Governments are not sequestering your wealth -- rich people are.
Any time people bring up concerns about fraud and waste in social problems only, I dismiss them out of hand as using that fear to justify their selfishness.
If one isn't calling out waste and abuse in their favorite programs too, then their concern is insincere and should be treated as such. Pro tip: audit the DOD.
There are zero studies which show this.
Free money as in quantitative easing that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy?
Completely unsubstantiated FUD. The underlying problem is the structure of the economic system they reside in.
Value for whom?
Most of what you said is greatly exaggerated or simply not true. It's like you cherry picked Fox News talking points.
It would be a huge waste though. We should probably spend it on food, education, and healthcare instead.
Wealth is farms, factories, skills, etc. How would destroying all that improve anyone's life?
Wealth isn't money. It exists independent of any currency you can use to give it notional value.
I guess if I am a factory owner I could produce a Yacht, but as a humble employee I'd be unlikely to experience or enjoy the produced Yacht's of the factory, and it also seems like the factory owner would sell most of their produced Yacht's for money, not "farms, factories, skills"
I think GP means we could destroy the taxed money, which would benefit everyone by either deflating their savings (the same money is worth more), or allowing more money to be printed for social programs without causing rampant inflation. This is getting pretty close to MMT.
Perhaps we could also engage in less ill considered military adventurism as well? Causing a domestic affordability crisis as a distraction and a salve for one's ego seems like a bad idea.
Ironically, it's already incredibly dire. People are stupid -- it's crazy making to watch this play out.
But now it literally feels like a bad horror flick where there's a zombie mind-control virus that turns people into passive drones that can no longer have independent thought.
And while I used the word "stupid", there's plenty of otherwise intelligent people that have fallen prey to this and there's literally nothing one can say or do to have them reconsider their stance.
Likelt has to do with not having any property or wealth taxes, but having modest incone taxes that were rigorosly collected
Your accountant can clarify the difference.
My question is really the economic efficiency of their other 98%, which is becoming about half of available resources.
I suspect the evidence would show their investment gains are less from productivity and more from coordinated extractions, and that there are severe limitations that come from consolidated decision-making (after all, the premise behind the market is that the collective is smarter than the king). Not to mention that buckets of money probably are also alienating and defeat healthy self-discipline, particularly for the next generation.
I would love instead to find that new money seeks and creates new opportunities, particularly those that are beyond what you can convince collectives to do.
It's pretty obvious that ants threatening elephants won't go far, but (to abuse the analogy) I suspect elephants would take helpful hints. Expanding wealth inequality should make it easier for great ideas to take off, so perhaps that's a better focus.
E.g., if I have no noticeable tax on my wealth as I create impact for the world through my companies I'm going to keep being the one person in charge of that (to achieve my mission of reaching mars, etc.). But if I'm going to get nicked (to the tune of billions of dollars even at 2% etc), on average I'm going to redeploy my assets via people I trust in the company etc. I might even invest more in public welfare projects. It is fair arguably that there is this forcing function because one's value accrues from those projects originally. So there is an elegant symmetry at the end too.
It would be unfair to tax billionaires more if they truly worked in a vacuum and provided value to the economy through very few dependencies. But that's never the case. And right now too much excess is spent on things like these sport teams via inherited wealth etc.
This is the main lesson of the 20th century that liberals refuse to accept; that the state is controlled by capitalist class interests. Capitalist democracy is a curated racket.
And even if we were to force legislation exactly as described above it can't and hasn't lasted long due to the incentives ($billions) to undo it. They will go as far as to kill people for this, and they have.
Legislation does NOT fundamentally change existing power relations. They have this shit in their pockets and you're just saying that we should have them take it out of their pockets.
The western allergy towards Marxism is one of the most detrimental cultural positions the working class has EVER faced.
It was an ideology that at its height ruled a third of the world including some of the most populous and resource rich territories on earth yet still fell within decades.
The increased income inequality within much of the developed world has happened at the same time as ever increasing state influence over the economy.
"They will go as far as to kill people for this" is rich coming from someone preaching Marxism, for which millions have been murdered.
Libertarians always try to convince us that the corporate boot tastes so much better than the governmental one, but they both taste like leather to me and I at least have a say, however small, on the government.
And it's no surprise they took these positions, considering the FBI originally deemed the likes of "It's a Wonderful Life" as communist propaganda and claimed it "made bankers look bad."
https://www.newswise.com/articles/ruining-your-holidaywhy-th...
> "What's interesting in the FBI critique is that the Baileys were also bankers," said Noakes. " and what is really going on is a struggle between the big-city banker (Potter) and the small banker (the Baileys). Capra was clearly on the side of small capitalism and the FBI was on the side of big capitalism. The FBI misinterpreted this classic struggle as communist propaganda. I would argue that 'It's a Wonderfil Life' is a poignant movie about the transition in the U.S. between small and big capitalism, with Jimmy Stewart personifying the last hope for a small town. It's a lot like the battle between Home Depot and the mom and pop hardware store."
It didn't just "lose", it killed millions of its own people in the process. Having been born in a communist state, I'd rather clean toilets in American than do anything else in the USSR.
Edit: It's basically impossible to communicate the day-to-day misery and deprivation of late stage Communism without sounding like a crazy person. My parents were both university-educated professionals but we lived in a tiny, one-bedroom apartment with occasional hot running water and only newspaper for wiping after the bathroom. This was considered a rather affluent existence.
To find something similar in today's America you'd have to go to the worst, most impoverished parts of town and even then...
China is an interesting example too because it's basically capitalist with strong government oversight. So you can go hog wild on exploiting labor and amassing wealth as long as you don't oppose the overall goals of the government. We'll see how long they can keep it running - the problem with most authoritarian systems is that they're only as good as their current leadership, and when that changes things tend to fall apart.
Or get TOO big. You can get a few billion here and there, but don't think that you're bigger than the government. And don't act like it, either.
The nuance that capitalist businesses do not hold an exclusive interest now or historical pioneering of labor exploitation is valuable to keep in mind because no matter how far the project of labor power spreads, all we workers must keep in mind that we have a primary and vested in empowering the most diminished of our society.
So it's just not fair, your comparisons. You're not looking at the whole picture.
Go to Ecuador to clean toilets and you'll see what capitalism does to workers.
What do you mean?
We know how many people communism killed, but has anyone done the same math on capitalism? Maybe they're both very bad, and we have to find a third way.
Remember capitalism isnt a vibe its the private control of production for profit.
All "third way" people are just capitalists with extra checks and balances for freedom.
What they dont say or realize is that these extra checks and balances can be done away with by the very incentives of the people they think wont.
Power isnt a vibe, its the control of production made policy.
Not cool. Other users were perfectly able to respond to the parent with curious conversation. I'm not going to respond any further publicly. You can email us if you want to discuss further.
With that said HN is an international community, and it is important to respect the perspectives of people from around the world.
Is it inappropriate for people to call for the kidnapping and arrest of Maduro from Venezuala? Doesn't appear to be from recent conversations here.
Is it inappropriate for people to call for the overthrow of the Iranian government and the assassination of the Ayatollah? Doesn't appear to be from recent conversations here.
Is it inappropriate for people in Canada or Greenland to discuss the prospect of American civil war and how it could potentially benefit them personally by minimizing the threat of American aggression that results in the invasion and annexation of their countries? Certainly appears to me from your response and previous conversations on here.
As a non American it's conspicuous and frustrating to see how this discussion around what is and isn't acceptable speech about violence often lines up with whatever the current foreign policy of the American government happens to be. And that isn't to say that this site and others censor discussions that are critical of these policies, just that they seem to clamp down on discussions about violence when it's about domestic American violence even when it's being discussed by non-Americans like jacquesm?
Why is that? Why is it okay Americans to call for the assassination of the Ayatollah but people from outside of America can't talk about the prospect of civil war and political assassinations in America?
I'm a Canadian. The leader of your country has made many comments about annexing my country. It is quite likely that right-wing American interests are funding a separatist movement in my province. I consider this an overt threat to the well being of everyone in my community and my personal well being.[0][1]
While America is nominally a democracy I don't hold the American people responsible for this threat. Instead I hold the American oligarchs and the skilled professionals who enable the creation of their authoritarian machinations (Including the employees of Oracle and IBM as you helpfully pointed out in a recent comment) responsible for this bullshit that now threatens me.
So from that perspective why isn't it acceptable to acknowledge the necessity for the arrest of American oligarchs like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Larry Ellison? Why isn't it acceptable to call for the smuggling of weapons into America to facilitate revolutionary activities akin to what people were calling for the CIA to do in Iran?
Ideally I don't want anyone to come to harm. But I have to be real about this, the more fractured America is the better off I am in the short term. Our incentives have become misaligned through no fault of my own. So something has to give.
If you were in my shoes you'd feel the same way.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43485649#43487443
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/russia-and-u-s-amplif...
And if you read the article you will see his mention of the wealthy that are advocating for higher taxes/better wealth distribution and explicitly says that not all wealthy are The Enemy.
Oh more than half. In France it's 59% officially. And then there are the fake "private" companies that are actually owned by french-state apparatchiks and operating like the various state monopolies (like utility companies): so the real number is higher than 59%. France has probably more than 2/3rd of its GDP that is public spending. It's basically a planned economy.
A planned economy with the only expected result of a planned economy: the public debt of France is 115% of the GDP growing. Inflation is through the roof (you think gas prices are high in the US?). And they have zero clue as to how they're going to pay their empty promises of pensions to the aging population.
But what's really amazing in a country like France where 2/3rd of the GDP is public spending is this: publications constantly hammer the exact same message as in TFA: "We should tax the rich!". The french Piketty (who's btw never worked for a second in the private sector in his life: a pure product from the socialist french education system who's exceptionally good at creating state-lovers ever begging for more taxes) is mentioned in TFA.
2/3rd of the GDP being public spendings but instead of trying to get out of that planned economy the message hammered by all the media (who are either owned by the media of by the french-state apparatchiks) is: "Tax the rich".
The delicious irony of the 3 first of the only 5 companies France has in the Top 100 by market cap (and none in the Top 50) being three companies selling luxury goods and bringing money into France by selling luxury products outside of France is of course not lost on people.
There's LVMH, L'Oreal and Hermes exporting like mad luxury products and bringing in money from overseas into France and, instead of giving the people owning these companies medals, France explains that you should "tax the rich".
Yeah. But no. I just don't buy it.
I'd rather be poor in a capitalistic society than live as a slave in a planned communist economy.
"Better dead than red" FWIW too.
Either we make significant change whilst we still have some capacity to reason, or we consign ourselves to the fate of animals, following our impulse gradients to the places they invariably lead.
Citizens United and public capture in general are forming an aristocratic class in the United States.
I don't expect Social Security (or my country's equivalent) to exist in anything like its current form when I'm old enough to retire. This is the last hurrah and it's shocking how we're pulling out all the stops to make it happen.
[1] https://www.sos.ca.gov/administration/news-releases-and-advi...
Again, we can argue the exact numbers, 20% is just an example. Some percentage is also needed for public infrastructure works and stuff like healthcare, and we don't want the total to be too high, nor the component parts to be too low.
Fiscal policy all about adjusting those levers (how much, and where, the government injects money into the economy, and how much, and where, the government extracts it back out) in order to promote the society we want to have.