SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
khallow (3766)
[Mykl:] This is actually the exact problem in the US at the moment. Money is trickling to the top and not making its way back down. Those at the top are hoarding it, thus keeping it out of, and slowing, the economy. This in turns damages the businesses that they own, because their customers can't afford to spend money that they don't have.
The problem would be largely solved by handing out a bunch of cash to employees, who will use it to go out and spend, stimulating the economy and generating demand (thus improving the outlook of business). It would actually be a win-win, but the cash hoarders can't see beyond having the biggest number in the bank they can (which they'll never spend).
The big thing missed is that due to inflation, hoarding money means losing money. Rather than wonder why businesses aren't hiring people or building up capital right now, Mykl merely suggests that the business give away that money to create a little short term economic activity and something that will be better than the present state of affairs while ignoring that the business has just thrown away its cheapest means to expand and employ more people. Later on in the same thread, we have this gem:
[deimtee:] I think this is actually becoming one of the major problems, especially on the small end of the investment scale. At some point, the economy is producing enough to feed, house, and entertain everyone without requiring anywhere near enough human work to keep everyone employed.
Investing in a new business requires identifying an under-filled need in order to attract customers. It is getting to the point where starting a new business means competing with a giant company, it is just not viable unless you can come up with something that is both truly new and valuable. Not many people can do that, and every time one does there is one less opportunity left. At the same time, big companies are streamlining and using automation and economies of scale to reduce the number of employees.
The solution, of course, was to shrink the labor market, not fix the problems described above.
[khallow:] Deliberately shrinking the labor market won't identify under-filled needs nor create more small and medium sized businesses.
[deimtee:] The labour market is currently over-supplied. This is evidenced by the difficulty young people have in entering it. Raising the retirement age is like eating your seedcorn. By the time those geriatrics are finally knocked off by COVID 2040 or something society is going to hit a wall where no-one knows how to do the jobs. 30 year-olds on unemployment for 10 years are not ideal trainees and no trainers will be around anyway. Early retirement forces the companies to train the next generation now.
Yes we should be massively investing in life-extension, medical research, space, all that stuff. Now what percentage of people do you think can realistically contribute to that sort of endeavor? I would say less than 1% of people have the capability to undertake research at that level.
Notice the insistence on shrinking the labor market even when presented with clear evidence that we need that labor for hard, open-ended problems and to preserve institutional knowledge. In the recent story, Kill the 5-Day Workweek (which was about some business that does 4 day workweeks), we see more examples of this dysfunctional reasoning in action. There's anecdotes about bad bosses, insistence that economies is less rigorous than physics, and lots of fantasizing about all the amazing things you'd do, if your employer was forced to give you one more day off. Let's start with the "bullshit jobs":
[Thexalon:] Counterpoint: A lot of jobs are completely useless and exist for basically bullshit reasons. If you've ever worked in a larger corporation or non-profit, you will have no difficulty identifying a bunch of Wallys or Peter Gibbonses walking around who are accomplishing absolutely nothing but vaguely looking like they might be working. And no, that's not limited to government, because despite what a lot of libertarians seem to think private corporations are not even close to perfect models of efficiency.
To summarize the above link, some clueless idiot doesn't understand a variety of jobs. So those jobs must not have a reason for being and are thus "bullshit jobs". Notice that once the author has failed to understand the purpose of these jobs, he then has to come up with a conspiracy theory for why they exist.
[author David Graeber:] The answer clearly isn't economic: it's moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the '60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.
Who here really thinks that Joe Billionaire is going to burn money on that?
Then there's the fantasizing about how shortening the workweek and the amount of work per job won't have any impact on competition from other countries.
[AC1:] A lot of Asian companies still work on Saturday (6 day week ). If going to a 4 day workweek in any way hurts productivity these Asian firms will have an advantage
[AC2:] Ridiculous, and already proven wrong since they are open an extra day already and haven't taken all the business.
"Proven wrong" because those Asian companies haven't eaten entirely our lunch. We still have some left. Funny how half a century of off-shoring can be ignored.
Moving on, it wouldn't be complete without a contribution from the peanut gallery. fustakrakich continues his bid to destroy Western civilization:
[fustakrakich:] Also demand a six hour work day. Make each day a little less tiresome
Here's my take on all this. It's basically a supply and demand problem in the developed world. Due to labor competition from the developing world, developed world labor has lost much of its pricing power. For some reason, most of the above posters think we can get back to higher labor prices by reducing the supply of labor. What's missing from that is that the developing world is still increasing its supply of labor (more from building out trade/transportation infrastructure to populations than from birth rate). Those moves won't actually reduce labor supply as a result.
Instead, let's increase the demand for labor. Rather than rhetorically ruling out the creation of new businesses and such, how about we enable those things to happen. Because plenty of new businesses still happen - indicating the narrative is faulty.
But that would mean acknowledging that protecting labor is less important than nurturing business growth and creation. Who will do that?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday June 23 2021, @02:50PM (30 children)
Here's your spoon. Start digging ditches.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 23 2021, @09:53PM (3 children)
It would have been so much cooler if you said,
*Here's your spoon. Start digging, bitches!*
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @01:30AM (2 children)
Was that one India Walton's campaign slogans?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday June 24 2021, @02:04AM (1 child)
I dunno, Stalker McStalkerson of the Creep Blue Sea. You tell me since you seem to be shadowing my movements.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @01:08PM
Perhaps it's the fact you've frequently commented on your location that invited the topical quip? Anyway, I'll let you get back to "stalking" (your words) the sites favorite Arkansas ammosexual.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Thursday June 24 2021, @02:10AM (24 children)
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 24 2021, @03:13AM
It's all good, with shorter work days/weeks they can create more jobs. They can open up a fourth shift. Win-win..
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday June 24 2021, @07:24PM (22 children)
"Job creators" is going to go down in history as one of the most blasphemous self-parodying abuses of language the country has ever inflicted on itself.
You seem to think, Mr. Hallow, that you are part of some morally-superior economic cabal. You are not. You are not a "job creator" either. You are not a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. You are not "in the club." The people wearing the boots you insist on licking 24/7/365.24 don't even know you exist, would laugh at you for being a useful idiot if they did, and are trying their level best to use that boot to stomp your head in.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 26 2021, @01:57AM (21 children)
I've refuted these already. And yet here you are with your personal movie still going. Get a new script.
There seems to be a bit of religious gobbledygook in your post. I'm not a member of your religion. I don't have to care what you think blasphemy and self-parody means, if anything.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday June 26 2021, @02:36AM (20 children)
You can no more make the truth false by denying it than you can block out the sun by writing "darkness" on the walls in your own shit, Hallow. And, from an epistemological standpoint, that is what you do whenever someone calls you on your bullshit.
Know what the root of all your issues economically is? You have this implicit assumption that the economy and economic activity is an end in and of itself, rather than a means to an end. You constantly advocate for attitudes and policies that amount to mass human sacrifice, dumping peoples' livelihoods and lives into the insatiable, grinding, mechanized maw of Mammon at whose feet you grovel.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Saturday June 26 2021, @03:27AM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 26 2021, @03:50AM (18 children)
Even if that were true (and it's not), that's not a significant root for issues. We live in a relatively free society that can handle a lot of exotic assumptions.
Another word to use here is trust. I trust that an economic system that has been refined for centuries to do the sort of thing you want economic systems to do, will still work, if we let it. Instead of destroying the value of labor and other short sighted things, how about we let the system do its job and deliver those things you want?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday June 27 2021, @03:56PM (17 children)
Ah, there's your problem, you actually think our economy was ever set up to help the common (wo)man. So your problem is ignorance rather than outright evil at the root of it. That's oddly comforting somehow. Not much but it's something. The problem, of course, is that you never check these assumptions, and that leaves you with some massive blind spots as to the nature of the beast.
Unchecked (or insufficiently-checked) capitalism is a concentrating tendency, one that accelerates itself and feeds back into itself. Very much like gravity: the more mass there is in one place, the stronger the pull of gravity and the more of a pull on the surrounding matter there will be.
Taken to its logical endpoint, and I've said this years ago in one of my journals, *the degenerate case of capitalism is feudalism.* Do you understand why, in light of the fact that capitalism qua capitalism is a positive feedback loop of concentration? Once you understand this, the necessity of redistribution and heavy taxes on the very top accumulations of wealth become not just obvious but a matter of capitalism's very survival.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 27 2021, @11:33PM
I don't care what it was set up to do, I care what it does.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 28 2021, @03:26PM (5 children)
And today we learn that what Azuma knows about economics would get her failed out of Econ 101.
No, for so many reasons. First, there's no such thing as unchecked capitalism because the very concept of private control of resources depends upon a legislative background that permits it to exist and manages things like contractual terms, torts and so on. Insufficiently checked capitalism is not a useful description of anything - at best it implies some sort of criterion, but when you define the problem as a tendency to concentrate, you run into the opposite situation: preventing concentration by definition undermines the very concept of personal control of resources because the returns from those resources aren't available to be claimed. Or, to put it more bluntly: if you run a confiscatory redistributive fiscal regime, you're not in capitalism land. The most charitable interpretation is to say that this reduces to an automatic capitalism-bad analysis, which wouldn't really be a surprise, but to even postulate this sort of nonsense except as a reductio ad absurdum by using hidden assumptions rests in a misunderstanding. It's like saying: Water is wet until we outlaw wetness.
Just because Azuma typed this doesn't make it true. Even if you take a straightforward marxist analysis at face value, you still don't end up with feudalism as opposed to manorialism, but as it turns out Marx's analysis has also been pretty roundly rejected outside his eternal fanclub, because there are way too many edge cases and escapes. Basically, you can't prevent workers from accumulating capital unless you strictly pay them starvation wages and utterly prevent them from any kind of moonlighting. The moment you have potential for individual enterprise, the analysis blows up, which is why you can have a millionaire plumber who both works and controls the means of his production.
Why yes, doctor, we had to kill the patient to save her. No, that makes no sense and the reason in question is that you started with false assumptions, flawed comprehension and inevitably drew bullshit conclusions.
Azuma's a one-note troll with a persecution complex anyway, but this was so much concentrated wrong-plus-stupid in one hole that it deserved a tub of lye.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday June 28 2021, @07:45PM (4 children)
Why do you think the only options are either 0% or 100% taxation? I've never seen anyone spend so many words to say so little and be so wrong with such a tiny amount of actual content. Your entire post is a false dilemma, at *best.*
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 28 2021, @09:16PM (3 children)
It's from your own words.
Capitalism is a concentrating tendency. i.e. capital flows to the hands of the Capital Elite (if you largely ignore history, but here I'm entering the bizarro world of Azumanomics anyway...) and this is a problem because thus spake Azuma.
How do you fix this?
By preventing those with capital from ... accumulating more capital.
If you don't, then they can accumulate more capital resulting in *gasp* concentration of capital! O noes, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
(What the hell, let's allow for some kind of accumulation that amounts to a pro rata allocation of capital per annum - the basis of the calculation doesn't substantially change. All it is, is a government-allocated capital gains margin.)
And there you have it. Got any? Get more? Bad person, we're taking it. Alternative: those with some can get more, thereby increasing concentration and That Is Evil Because It Makes Azuma Cry. Or something. Azuma didn't bother fleshing out the nuances beyond a nonsensical reference to feudalism.
So, there we have it. Direct derivation from primary source. Maybe if you had something else in mind you'd actually do what we tell toddlers to do, and use your words - but for a bonus level we might ask you to do what high schoolers do and actually study the background so that you'd use the correct words in the correct way.
SO - what did you ACTUALLY MEAN, that doesn't somehow end up with bad capitalist exploiter pigdogs getting dispossessed to prevent them from exploiting the lumpenproletariat with their robust, turgid, throbbing, TORRID capital?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday June 30 2021, @12:52AM (2 children)
How many times do I have to say this?! Do it like the Nordic countries do it! If it helps, think of it as investing in We The People...you know, making America great again, like before the 70s when wages stagnated even as productivity skyrocketed?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 30 2021, @11:43AM
Total compensation tracked [heritage.org] productivity. There isn't a significant deviation between the two until after 2000.
Something wrong with the narrative.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 30 2021, @06:26PM
The nordic countries have plenty of capital, and some very, very rich people indeed.
What else they have is nosebleed tax rates on their middle classes, notionally in exchange for their massive social safety net.
But wait, you know what else they have? A tendency to unwind both of the above, because they've decided that what seemed like a hot plot in the '60s is actually not so great, and in fact has had a few negative effects. For example, Norway (rich because of north sea oil), has been actively trying to foster native entrepreneurialism because they have more accumulated capital than their population feels like investing.
So doing it like the nordics means: unwind paternalism, reduce taxes, foster business.
... maybe this isn't what you had in mind.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 29 2021, @01:51AM (9 children)
To the contrary, I understand that we've been cranking on the capitalism machine for centuries and have yet to experience this positive feedback loop you allege. Presently, we're seeing the greatest improvement [voxeu.org] not just in the human condition, but also in income inequality (and that's despite me not even caring if income inequality decreases or not).
There's something wrong with the narrative. Go with what works, not the feelz.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday June 30 2021, @12:56AM (8 children)
This is willful blindness on your part, plain and simple.
Furthermore, your bizarre, anti-realist insistence that things will continue improving indefinitely misses a few key facts, like resource depletion or the punishing effects of globalization on American wages and purchasing power. It also assumes things that are completely physically impossible, such as infinite growth, unlimited (or as close as makes no difference) raw materials, unlimited ability to extract the same, relative climate and geopolitical stability, etc etc etc.
Again: this is willful blindness. You refuse to engage with reality. The reality is that we are perched on an unstable maximum, something akin to an economic false vacuum state, which could collapse to something more stable at any time. I don't simply mean a market correction; I mean all the above factors coming home to roost, likely all at once and bouncing off one another as complex systems are wont to do.
And underneath it all, again, is that implicit assumption that economic activity is an end unto itself.
Why do we pursue it, Hallow? What is the purpose of economic activity?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 30 2021, @04:18AM (7 children)
A "blindness" that reality shares. Notice I provided evidence - among other things two thirds of the poorest part of humanity seeing a 30% or greater increase in income (adjusted for inflation) over a recent twenty year period (1988-2008). What evidence do you provide? Anything more than feelz?
The problem with this narrative is that we have a lot of resource alternatives. Resource depletion actually means that we end up using moderately harder to access resources at modestly higher cost and/or technological development, not that we run out.
And my take is that we're nearing the end of those punishing effects of globalization because China is nearing wage parity with the US (mean wages in China currently are nearing a third of the mean wages in the US, and increasing at a rapid rate). When that happens, it'll be the relative strengths of the economic systems that determine what wages and purchasing power stabilize at. Protip: the US is doing surprisingly well at that.
Sure, there will be more poor workers out there. But when China reaches wage parity with the US at least a quarter of the world will be developed world at that point. We're running out of cheap labor. Incidentally, in case you should think that labor is a resource we can deplete, I'll note that we have the resource alternative of automation and it has served for centuries to make human labor more valuable and generated considerable power for labor.
If you should ever be interested in economic history, there's quite an impressive example of the successes of capitalist systems over the past few centuries, including the development of the modern, more humane world.
I already stated that assertion is incorrect, and you haven't provided any reasoning to back your side. So I consider the subsequent leading question a waste of my time to answer.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday June 30 2021, @05:00AM (2 children)
You can't answer it, can you? It's not a leading or complex question either; the answer to that question should determine economic policy. This isn't difficult...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 30 2021, @11:40AM
Definition of leading question [wiktionary.org]:
Let's review the question in question:
"is that implicit assumption that economic activity is an end unto itself" That's the leading question. Assume I'm wrong and then ask questions that lead to your desired answer.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 30 2021, @11:47AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 30 2021, @06:53PM (3 children)
I think that I can help here.
We pursue economic activity because every activity necessary to sustain life beyond perhaps breathing, is economic activity.
Gathering berries? Economic activity.
Fetching water? Economic activity.
Hunting? Economic activity.
But you know, if dying an ascetic's death of thirst and exposure is your bag, who should tell you not to?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 01 2021, @04:31AM (2 children)
Why are you replying to me instead of Azuma? Azuma is merely pushing a narrative, "that implicit assumption" remember? The implicit assumption is not implicit. There's no point to me answering the question in a serious way because she has already decided what the answer is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 01 2021, @09:13PM (1 child)
Because I clicked the wrong link.
Sorry for the confusion.
But she asked the question, and it has an answer, so it's there for the record.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 02 2021, @11:22PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @06:38AM
<neo>There is no spoon.</neo>
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 23 2021, @02:51PM (19 children)
Is this the inflation people were insisting wasn't going to happen as we entered lockdown last year? That v-shaped recovery is looking like it's suffering a supply-side recession after all... the price of lumber alone... And you know the wealthy don't hoard vulgar money, they purchase inflation proof assets.
Tightening the labor market increases wages for the working class and is necessary to sustain a middle class. BlackRock buying property and expecting rental income to fund pensions while the cost of labor is continuously forced down by importation of 3rd world slave labor manufactured products and open-borders immigration is fucking la-la land. The kicker is that AI and automation will obliterate demand for labor - here and in the developed world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 23 2021, @04:59PM
Freudian slip but no prophets lost!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 23 2021, @05:32PM (6 children)
Not just lumber. Steel as well. Energy isn't too cheap to meter, either.
Tightening the labour market might increase wages for some in the working class - the ones that get those jobs - but it also encourages outsourcing, and capital investment in automation and other forms of substitution.
BlackRock isn't quite as insane as all that. Follow the logic of your train of thought through: OK, labour costs are down, and the prices of supplies are down owing to outsourcing and importation of ... labour. These people will be living somewhere, right? It mightn't be fancy, but they won't be on the street. BlackRock's plan here is hedged against inflation, but won't completely collapse in the face of deflation either. Remember that housing demand is fairly inelastic. BlackRock will rent places to those who have the means; in a washed-out labour market, the returns might be low but they won't be nil. On the other hand, if the price collapse is broad-based, those low returns will sit pretty nicely when counted with deflation. Conversely, if people genuinely can't make ends meet because labour is washed out AND inflation is high? They will leave to where they can make a living. Emigration is a possibility too. In the USA, which is large enough that the cost of living is nowhere near uniform, there'll be a lot of internal migration, same as there has been for decades. And BlackRock will rent to those footloose arrivals, because ... the demand remains inelastic. The only way they'll lose their shirts is if chunks of presently densely-populated city turn into howling wasteland ghost towns.
Odds seem low.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 23 2021, @09:09PM (2 children)
...of an incoming rent-control law that will become necessary when wage growth completely fails to keep pace with the Feds asset bubble. It didn't have to be like that, is the point!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @01:51AM (1 child)
Rent control?
Seriously, rent control? The policy that keeps returning, and keeps giving the same gifts over and over and over, where buildings get revamped to evade the rent control rules, or go condo, or just never got built in the first place. The policy that has landlords cutting costs to the bone to keep them from just being moneypits, or having the buildings condemned and trashed just to outlast the rent control thing? The policy that has been proven time and again to reduce domicile availability? The perennial failure of urban planning? And on a federal level?
I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying I'll believe it when I see it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @03:14PM
Everything you said is true and BlackRock have it all to come.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday June 23 2021, @10:43PM (2 children)
Have you visited Detroit recently? They can't give houses away there. Baltimore is another stop to put on your itinerary.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @01:54AM
Sure, there are a few zones of urban blight. But I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that they're a teensy bit more selective about their placement than that.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday June 24 2021, @02:22AM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 24 2021, @01:31AM (10 children)
It does look quite v-shaped [statista.com] though. I grant that the enormous political spending of the past year may turn this into a double dip recession and/or create long term economic stagnation.
My take is that inflation proof assets may be very... inflated... right now. I think the reason that businesses are stocking up on cash, is that they expect better investments in a few months which may or may not include those inflation proof assets.
Unless it doesn't increase wages collectively for the working class. I think the big thing missed here is that such policies collectively produce substantial inefficiencies for the working class as a whole.
We have several centuries of evidence that AI and automation grew demand for labor instead. Maybe there's something wrong with the narrative.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @02:07AM (2 children)
A lot of businesses are stockpiling cash because of problems which are best survived with a lot of liquid assets on hand. Yes, inflation is eating the value, but as things are getting wobbly things like stock buybacks aren't always great because you can't reverse them and sell shares to raise cash without a lot of hoopla - and even then, if people aren't in a buying mood, it might not work to raise a lot of cash in a hurry.
As far as the working class is concerned, I believe it was Thomas Sowell who observed that the real minimum wage is zero. Some utopians are all excited about UBI as a way of changing that, but they seem dreadfully thin on how it will be paid for if you don't believe the MMT fairytale.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @06:32PM (1 child)
You supposed "realists" are so stupid. Economics is a made up system, entirely created by humans. Try flexing your imagination beyond the zero-sum limits.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25 2021, @09:18PM
This was marked Insightful.
OK, let's see what insight might be gleaned from it. Mods are never wrong.
Bald ad hominem. Moving on.
Not quite. In fact, not at all. Economics is the study of how people can, and do, run things. The modern economy is most certainly a human creation, but it's not a pure abstraction any more than the coffee you drink or the car you drive are pure abstractions. It's a process; a system that emerges from a set of rules and collective decisions. It didn't spring wholly formed from the heads of Smith or Keynes (or Marx or Friedman, for that matter).
So, uh, not so much with the insight, and heavy on the misconceptions so far. But let's keep looking, there's bound to be something.
This is ... an imperatively phrased suggestion, rather than an insight. But maybe inside? The problem is apparently a false apprehension of zero-sum limits. On what, is unspecified. Production? Manifestly not, because it's generally understood that people apply effort to come up with more than they put in - otherwise the effort would be self-defeating. OK, so not production. Development? No, it's pretty much a commonplace that science and technology march on. What else might have been under discussion ...
Money? Maybe this is about the UBI and MMT thing? Well, let's see what we have. Currently, we have an expanding money supply chasing still-struggling production capacities. Raw material commodity prices are rising, while cash flows around. Hm. That smells like inflation. What does MMT say about that? It says that the right thing to do is to withdraw cash from the system by raising taxes, selling bonds, and otherwise keep a damper on the cash supply. OK. But bond prices have an ugly way of pricing inflation in, because the coupon is the fixed part, and taxes adequate to account for the cash dump of UBI are going to have to be spectacular. I mean, we're talking multiple trillions of dollars, annually, to create a UBI approximating even $15/hour per US adult - and that's not even counting what it would take to displace the social welfare network. The average annual tax take would have to be roughly half the GDP, just to balance that huge UBI.
Of course, the UBI would have to be inflation-adjusted, otherwise it would be vulnerable to that, so one couldn't even inflate one's way out of that trap. And this is straight from MMT, not even some watered-down MMR version.
Even if you presume that somehow production will rise, friction-free, to match the gigantic cash dump (not exactly a historically well precedented presumption) and that you somehow keep inflation at bay with your punishingly severe taxes and that you somehow keep industry on side (good luck with that one, again it's not exactly historically supported), you just ended up with what is, in net terms, a gigantic redistribution plan that would make even 1950s Sweden's planners frown and mutter.
So what exact insight are we to gain from this?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @02:53AM (5 children)
Over-valued or a hedge against inflation though?
Yes, the luddites were wrong but the poverty caused by urbanization and the devaluing of labor is what Engels wrote about. Beyond your point in the journal about institutional knowledge, entire industries are reliant on the continued geopolitical stability that wealth transfer via offshoring is eroding. The big picture is that low skilled labor being imported through immigration is surplus, if not detrimental to current and short-term future social and economic reality.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 24 2021, @03:27AM (4 children)
Well, maybe if we really hope, he'll be right for once.
Like the police state industry? We can't have wealth transfer via offshoring erode that.
Except when it's not, of course. Low skilled labor wouldn't be imported, if it really was surplus.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @03:04PM (3 children)
The Condition of the Working Class in England was an observational book.
Unfortunate that some see China as a model to be followed.
Why are we driving down wages in shrinking job sectors? It's as if you want an expansionist welfare state.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 24 2021, @11:35PM (2 children)
And if it were remotely accurate, we wouldn't be here now.
Would those sectors be shrinking, if we weren't pumping up the cost of workers?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25 2021, @01:12AM (1 child)
It was accurate, it is why we're where we are now. [www.bl.uk]
Yes, due to automation. We're going in circles now.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 25 2021, @01:15PM
Obviously, then the solution is to hire less people so we can complete the destruction, much like turning the nose of a plane straight down results in the best crater.
I find it remarkable how you can continue to push this narrative in the face of little evidence for it. Globally there is massive hiring of people. It's only in places that have supply restrictions on labor that have these automation problems. Maybe we should look to the places that are doing employment better?
(Score: 2, Touché) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 24 2021, @03:20AM
Very funny. The reason they are "stocking up" is because the fed is piling it on faster than they can spend it.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Wednesday June 23 2021, @05:56PM (18 children)
Supply and demand have nothing to do with it. The financial industry is run by psychopaths. Your economic theories are nothing but simple astrology, a confidence game
You don't increase the demand for labor, you reduce the need for labor. Leisure is the end game, not labor. And we all are entitled to more leisure in these prosperous times.
Money is not "trickling to the top", the fed is flooding the building (while democrats tell us we have to raise taxes to pay for "infrastructure), they can't rid of it fast enough [soylentnews.org]. And they sure as hell won't send it where it's needed.
*psychopaths* that's what we leave in charge...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday June 23 2021, @06:53PM
:-) Shorter hours will do just that, in contrast to your ideal 24 hour work day 7 day week.. On the other hand, your turnover would be marvelous! No long term benefits to pay out
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday June 23 2021, @10:39PM (6 children)
"Leisure is the end game," said the Eloi.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday June 23 2021, @10:49PM (3 children)
:-) leisure, not livestock
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 24 2021, @01:33AM (2 children)
You've already talked at length about the Morlock financial industry. How's that working for you?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 24 2021, @02:16AM (1 child)
We have to "decouple" from the Morlocks, replace them with machines
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 24 2021, @02:23AM
I imagine Eloi cultivation would be much more efficient then.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 24 2021, @02:25AM (1 child)
(Score: 2, Touché) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 24 2021, @06:23PM
:-) Of course you would, it's a fairy tale... a perfect match for your ideals.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @02:19AM (9 children)
You might have a strong leisure preference, but I'll take a bet that you also have preferences for food, and drink, and a reasonably soft, sheltered place to sleep. You probably like some degree of safety from roving gangs, more-or-less intact clothing, and so on and so forth.
These things cost resources - usually abstracted as money. And the more you want, and the more lavishly and frequently you want it all, the more it takes. Who'll pay for that? Would you work a little extra to get a little extra chicken on your kids' plates? Many people would. In fact, many people don't like living on social safety nets because they aren't lavish, and they want more.
Some people work part time jobs, live in hovels, and have ample time for fishing, and it suits them. They are, however, a minority.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 24 2021, @02:28AM (8 children)
Please, enough of the 19th century work or starve economics. We didn't invent our modern appliances and automate our factories for nothing.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @06:29PM (5 children)
If we made it easy and safe to switch up our careers we would have a lot less burned out workers, a more diversely skilled workforce, and a happier population.
However, for the uber rich money is no longer the goal, they now work for power and without the feaudal employment system in the US right now they would lose their power over others. They really don't want that to happen.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25 2021, @03:21AM (4 children)
The very insightful Eric Arthur Blair;
I consider this to be one of the most illuminating interactions between Winston and O'Brien but interestingly, Winston's answer in the middle paragraph is almost never quoted. It is always reduced to just the final sentence about tearing minds apart. Maybe it hits too close to home, even for those petty tyrants like school teachers and managers.
To be honest, I think khallow imagines himself to be one of the Inner Party.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday June 27 2021, @03:59PM (3 children)
He does, yes. It is blindingly obvious: anyone who looks at things as they are and goes "this is fine" either *is* in the "Inner Party" or imagines that, morally, s/he ought to be or deserves to be and that this is somehow the same thing (and then cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth when they suddenly get their skulls caved in by the boot they've been licking).
Nothing will teach him and his kind except personal suffering of a type specifically germane to his arrogant assumptions along these lines. A month homeless or so ought to do it, preferably without a shelter to go to.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Monday June 28 2021, @01:29AM (2 children)
Well, you're just another goon missing their torture room.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday June 28 2021, @07:39PM (1 child)
You call it torture, I call it "personal responsibility." If you don't want to learn your lessons the hard way, learn them from a position of relative safety and comfort. Remember, this is all being graded...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Tuesday June 29 2021, @01:38AM
That's because you are a dumbass. Actually exercising personal responsibility eliminates quite a bit of suffering.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @07:31PM (1 child)
Have a *whoosh* for the point that you completely missed.
Even if you have a social safety net, all the resources that go into it have to come from somewhere. Someone has to be the doctor that patches up your leg after you used your social safety net to get drunk and wrap your social safety net bicycle around a tree at the bottom of a gully. Someone has to be trucker, someone has to be the road maintenance, someone has to farm the food and someone has to dig up the cobalt out of the Congo that goes into your social safety net phone.
And what if you decide that you want more than your social safety net provides? Instead of a bicycle and budweiser, you want an ATV and Wild Turkey to fuel your poor decisions? How will you finance those? Maybe you will run a garbage truck to help keep the social environment nicer? And then maybe that isn't enough to really fund the hookers-and-blow benders that you would like to experience? Maybe you'd pick up a qualification and work on high tension power lines to help structure that social safety system?
The point is that motivations to have more do not always have to sit hard up against the breadline. People will work very hard indeed to make arrangements to improve their children's lives, doing things like paying for extracurricular training or private schools or what-have-you. So what do you do to those strivers? Ban them for being naughty-naughty greedy pigs? Tax the three-phase donkeyfuck out of them to support everyone else who doesn't share those motivations, because how dare they show initiative and motivation? Or just write up employment laws that are so onerous and byzantine that the establishment of any substantial enterprise outside of government is impractical?
What's the plan?
Or do we acknowledge that people will respond to an expanding scope of possibility by exploiting those possibilities to improve their own lives as far as they may? Because the track record sure as hell seems to support that tendency.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 24 2021, @08:36PM
Point? [youtu.be]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Wednesday June 23 2021, @07:14PM (34 children)
Congratulations.
There are quite a few assumptions you're making there. From where I'm sitting, it seems that in the Great Game of Monopoly, we're in the end stages, where a very small handful of people own all the streets and utilities and already have hotels on Mayfair and Park Lane. People like me can't move for paying rent to someone and the money we get for passing Go doesn't cover it.
All that money is sitting in piles at the side of the board and it's going nowhere.
It has become apparent since COVID, particularly in the UK economy, that we have a substantial part of that economy that isn't doing very much of high value at all. It's doing things like cutting hair, pulling pints, polishing finger nails and the like. Oh, and organising weddings.
There is plainly too much labour and not enough good work. We even have a vindictive government whose ideology is to harry the sick and disabled into "work" to beg for a few crumbs merely to exist, rather than admitting that these people as human beings have a right to life and are valuable in ways other than mere money. We have people going for several weeks with no money and no food as a result.
Other people are worked half to death, often putting in many hours per week unpaid just because.
We really need to reconsider our priorities. There's nothing magic or inherently noble about working your fingers to the bone merely to survive as The Man gets rich. It's folly, and it's unnecessary. We need to be working fewer hours, and we need to be investing in our societies, not in a few super-wealthy individuals.
In my not so humble experience and opinion, that's not how it works. The Man cares only about the bottom line, getting something out of his assets/cost base/staff for as little as possible. Institutional knowledge is not even incidental when the work can be outsourced to a body shop of young, exploited, hungry workers with no other option.
I wouldn't go so far as to call you a clueless idiot. That would be rude.
The Man already outsources to Other Countries. Automation is coming anyway.
But Mr Scrooge, it's Christmas!
We are supposedly an intelligent species. We need to use our intelligence to rise above the most simplistic forms of supply and demand. There really is no need for those of us lucky enough to have jobs to work such long hours, and there's no need for the old, sick and disabled to be hounded and harried into working just for the sake of it. Seriously, we need to tap into some of that humanity that some of us allegedly had. Great progress was made in various places in the 20th Century. For example, here in the UK we got a Welfare State and a National Health Service. We got universal healthcare free and the point of use, unemployment, child and disability benefits, sick pay, union rights, all sorts of things, and they're being gradually eroded by people like your good self, who are perpetuating a simplistic and backward narrative. We have a highly partisan right-wing press colluding with our increasingly further-to-the-right politicians. And why? What for? What do you have to gain from a stressed, over-worked, exploited, miserable, tired, ill, hungry society?
Why should we as a species work harder when we can work smarter? It just doesn't make any sense.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Thursday June 24 2021, @02:07AM (10 children)
I think this paragraph illustrates the problems in a nutshell. First, the delusion that you can rise above standard, proven models of market behavior through sheer desire. This is typical cargo cult worship. You want cargo; planes bring cargo; so rise above those standard models of resource creation and make those wooden knockoffs of planes that will bring that cargo in. Notice there's not a bit of evidence that this works.
Second, there's this emphasis on an imagined lack of choice. We're "lucky enough to have jobs", "hounded and harried into working just for the sake of it", etc. The narrative ignores our choices in the matter. We can choose otherwise. We have a lot of choice in what employers we work for, if any, and what we do with the wages and benefits we earn. It also is bizarre how this narrative is immediately discarded when the employer is considered. They're providing employment which allows us to live so well and our societies to function. But not a word of respect for them.
Then there's the laundry list of entitlements which are supposed to be so good. As usual with such things, blame is already assigned for the failure to the two minute hate targets - the critics of these entitlements. If your UK sugar is being eroded by mere "simplistic and backward narrative", then maybe you ought to wonder why that happens. Similarly, there's no consideration for the price tag. Who's paying for this and what aren't they doing for the citizens of the UK because their money is going elsewhere.
My take is widespread economic stagnation, failure of the entitlements, and a century of decline is a natural consequence. I didn't evaporate most of the UK auto industry, for example. And all those entitlements didn't fix that society's problems.
This leads to my answer to the question "What do you have to gain from a stressed, over-worked, exploited, miserable, tired, ill, hungry society?" You get a better world than you can get from bread and circuses.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Thursday June 24 2021, @05:53PM (9 children)
Your reply illustrates many problems in a nutshell. As has been said many times before, attempting to engage in any sort of rational discussion with you is usually a futile exercise. You haven't considered a single word I said. You haven't engaged your brain, you have merely reacted according to your internal dogmatism.
You refuse to even attempt to understand.
Why are you so apparently callous, even sadistic? What have you got against your fellow human beings?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 25 2021, @12:48PM (8 children)
Merely saying something, even a bunch of times, is not rational discussion. Notice how much of your post is about your perception rather than what's really going on ("From where I'm sitting, it seems"). Well, from where I'm sitting, you look like a problem not a solution.
To the contrary, my previous post shows I considered a whole paragraph. That's more than a single word. Now, I suppose you could then slide to a position that I merely considered a fragment of your post, but the paragraph in question wasn't your first.
But perhaps I haven't engaged my brain? Let's look at your first two sentences.
Notice first, you don't give a reason why intelligent species should do this anywhere in your post (even if we assume the inevitability of things like automation), much less need to. My take is the simplistic forms of supply and demand work pretty well though some manifestations are a bit gritty and hard for the more intelligent of us to understand. The less simplistic ones tend to fail hard due to cargo cult mentality because the whole point of such theories is to avoid thinking about that gritty, hard reality. Build the planes and the cargo will come. That's the supply and demand talked about in labor-restricted strategy.
Where's the evidence that brain-engaging happened here? It doesn't seem to me a strategy that intelligent species would adopt if they understood it.
Imagine if we adopted similar strategies for other goods and services that we need. Food and water prices too high? Force everyone, even the starving, to eat and drink less. Too many people want vital medical services? Force them to wait their turn with those who die first making the line shorter. Too much stuff heading to the landfill? Come up with nonsensical, micromanaging recycling mandates and waste restrictions without regard to the viability of the regulations (and often eliminating [soylentnews.org] better recycling strategies in the process). Corn prices too low? Let's force people to put corn ethanol into their gas tanks, increasing [wikipedia.org] global food prices in the process.
Notice how quickly I slid from hypothetical examples to real world examples? We already know the strategy of impairing supply and demand doesn't work. We have many real world failures to choose from.
The answer is that I want a better world for everyone not just the few elites running the bread and circuses. Such mechanisms as forcing people out of work and creating a vast array of entitlements automatically force society into two classes, those who depend on the largess of the state and those powerful enough to do without.
The power that is delegated to the state here is considerable and mostly unnecessary. It creates [soylentnews.org] a society of dependents. It diverts resources from more important needs. And it makes the problems it's supposed to fix worse.
It's time to learn from our mistakes.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday June 25 2021, @03:10PM (7 children)
Then you are very confused and mistaken. And you still haven't really listened to what I said or thought about it.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25 2021, @09:25PM (3 children)
"And you still haven't really listened to what I said or thought about it."
I think he did listen.
I think that he just didn't believe. He didn't take your word for it. He needs persuasion.
So why don't you actually do some serious work on creating a well-derived, narrowly-reasoned, persuasive argument?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday July 01 2021, @05:56PM (2 children)
I've tried before and he didn't listen. His replies here demonstrate that I shouldn't bother wasting my time again. So I won't.
I once tried to explain the concept of socialised health care (like the British NHS) to him using examples about collective buying power and insurance (shared risk). He outright shouted me down, deliberately ignoring the points I was trying to make.
So I don't think I'll try again.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 01 2021, @09:23PM
Socialised medicine is awesome.
The NHS was great - until it wasn't, and then Harley Street was the alternative. So much for the dream.
Dealt with the same crap under other national health systems in other countries. Bent double in agony in a hospital, incapable of coherent action, they just left me there until I got my friend to take me home because I'd rather die in my bed than a hospital floor. Lost thirty pounds or so in a week, but managed to pull through (no thanks to them).
In fact, as many countries as I've been in, I've received the best, promptest and most helpful medical care in the US. Socialised health care? Thanks, you can have it. You can have it all, because I've had it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 03 2021, @12:41AM
I tried looking for that (I've gone through a lot of posts, stories, and journals). Haven't found it yet, if it exists in the first place. Perhaps you're thinking of someone else?
(Score: 0, Redundant) by khallow on Saturday June 26 2021, @02:02AM (2 children)
Unless, of course, I'm not. That's the problem with just asserting things. You aren't likely to be right, unless you've actually thought about it enough to come up with a rational argument.
Where's the proof?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday July 01 2021, @05:57PM (1 child)
In your replies, of course.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 02 2021, @12:21PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @06:22AM (14 children)
There's something I think many people don't really appreciate.
Let's take every single item sold in a year, every single service, every single "thing". Add up its commercial value to get a gross sum of all the money generated. And now let's divide that evenly between everybody. What would it be? Many who don't know what I'm describing might expect this answer to be millions of dollars, after all - how else can we have people with tens of billions of dollars? In reality, it's of course nowhere near. All I've described is the GDP/capita. It's currently only $65,298. That is with the endless games, worthless products and services, and a literally life-or-death coercion to bring that figure as high as you possibly can. Yet it's only $65k, comparable to the average salary of a plumber.
Now imagine you dropped all coercion, got rid of all of these "worthless" jobs, and so much more. What would it be? Suffice to say dramatically lower. And the things you mention as "free" are not free. They're driven by extensive labor, companies, and support. Last year the UK spent about $4,400/person on healthcare. And in your ideal world where nobody is forced to work, this number would likely *go up*. The reason is that a lot of the jobs that you're paying for in that $4,400 are things people don't want to do. But they do them, because they need to put food on the table. Give them the option of no longer having to even bother with that, and they could happily go home and spend time pursuing their own interests, with their family, etc. You're going to need to really bring up the $$$ their to get them go back to what they were doing.
And that effect trickles around everywhere. That food on the table, which we're now somehow supplying? Exact same story. The global wealth starts to collapse at the same time that it becomes more expensive than ever to get people to actually do things. Can you guess what happens when you combine these two things? You don't need to look far for examples. It's not like the people that took over places such as China or what would become the USSR were secretly plotting to become tyrants. They believed what they were saying, what you are saying, and thought that the only thing between comfort and equality for all, was a little bit of elbow grease and rearranging of society. And they acted on it. And in both nations, both of which were previously relatively thriving, they created dystopias where in both tens of millions of people would end up dying of starvation. And in both, as the coercion to work and produce was removed, they found people suddenly stopped working and producing. And so the government was left to take over the previous coercive role of the market leading to dystopic authoritarianism.
In a nutshell, our wealth is a facade. It is little more than a reflection of our economic system. The efforts to take our wealth as a granted and use that "reform" the economic system fail because the wealth and the economic system are one and the same.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Thursday June 24 2021, @12:16PM
You have needs that are particular to you. Hence, it is reasonable to expect that you do something about those needs that are particular to you.
This is one of the key aspects of the making things worse of the title. There is no point to making it more expensive to actually do useful things, but that's the effect of so much of the labor regulations, taxation, corruption, etc that is out there. And then many proponents of these policies will just double down rather than consider that labor, just like any other market-based good or service, experiences traditional supply and demand behavior. Make labor more expensive to procure and you'll get less employment. Meanwhile remove roadblocks to hiring people should, as in the rest of the world, result in a surge of employment.
I see you haven't bothered to define wealth. Sure, we could define it as our economic system, but we already have the label "economic system", we don't need more such labels. Instead, wealth is typically defined as an accumulation of an asset we value. Here, we quickly see that wealth has an existence independent of economic system. The key wealth of most people is their potential to create value - such things as their education, work skills, and capital that allows them to do jobs, etc. Skills and education don't change, if the economic system changes, for example. The same goes for hard assets. A vehicle or building won't cease to exist just because a different economic system is employed. Using those assets may become more or less difficult depending on the economic system, but the use of the asset in itself is independent of economic system. If you drive from point A to point B, the action doesn't change no matter the economic system.
The bottom line is that economic systems are about doing things, distributing resources, and providing things of value. Different systems and other infrastructure can change the relative difficulty of these things or what we consider valuable, but they don't change us or our needs, much less the assets we use. Sure, most of our current wealth might disappear with relatively modest destruction of technical infrastructure (say in some sort of extreme solar event), but it's not our economic system that creates meaning behind wealth.
And the bottom line is what we do with that wealth rather than the wealth itself. Just because the economic system can change (and often does, this is not a rare problem) to render some wealth worthless at some future time doesn't mean that wealth shouldn't have value now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @03:26PM
No plotting necessary, it's who they are. Mao was a fat, smelly, pedophilic psychopath. Lenin was a syphilitic and a sociopath.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Thursday June 24 2021, @05:49PM (11 children)
Relatively thriving? Do you know how many were starving in Russia in 1917? Do you have a clue?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @06:39PM (4 children)
Russia was ill prepared to enter WW1, the economic cost to an impoverished country was devastating. Then along came the sociopaths [fee.org] to make things worse.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday June 25 2021, @03:22PM (3 children)
From the linked article, Professor Yuri N. Maltsev apparently makes some good points and important observations, but spoils it towards the end with this unsubstantiated piece of conjecture and opinion:
It seems that the learned professor has trouble with making distinctions, with nuance, and has allowed his very negative personal experience from times past to cloud his judgement.
Of course he's scared of anything with "socialism" in the name: he lived in the USSR. But he fails to understand the difference between the different applications of the word.
I want to live in civillisation, where there is a decent, basic level of provision for the young, old, sick and less fortunate. To a first approximation, this is "socialism."
None of us exists in isolation. I don't want to live in a Libertarian society where I have to constantly worry about what will happen if I break my leg, who might be pointing an assault rifle or bazooka at me, that I might have to pay a fee to walk down the street, and so on. I don't mind paying a fair amount of tax for good, free and the point of use public services. I want free and fair multi-party elections. I want a diverse range of opinion in the media. I want freedom of expression, the right to life, the right to health, the right to justice and the protection of the law. I want peace and the right and opportunity to get on with my own life.
Ideally, I want a democratically elected head of state too, and a government elected by a system of proportional representation.
I recently moved back to my birth country of Scotland. Scotland seems to be going forward, unlike England. If we are lucky, we might get independence and we can take full responsibility for our own futures.
I've put my money where my mouth is, and I'm determined to see it through.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 30 2021, @07:09PM (2 children)
No, it's not. It covers a vast range of possible approaches from outright feudal paternalism through welfare capitalism.
Socialism involves the society-level (which is to say, de facto government) control of society's resources. Even where there's a bureaucratic fig leaf around notional private ownership and management, it's subordinated to corporatist (which refers to society as a whole, not corporations) policies that effectively hobble private control. (The nazis rather liked this approach, which is how they ended up getting businesses to do the things that they wanted done. Nominally, you had a business, but if you wanted to keep nominally having it, you did what the guys with the sharp fashion sense and bad attitudes told you to do.)
If you think that socialism is a precondition for a social safety net, I can see how you would kind of like socialism, but they're really not the same thing. In fact, you can have socialism without the safety net. Venezuela is currently experiencing what it's like when the nominally socialist safety net wears thinner than fishnet hose.
In effect, socialism turns everyone outside the government into serfs who do not control the bulk of their own economic activity. I'm assuming you're not on board with that. But maybe you are, anything's possible.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday July 01 2021, @05:53PM (1 child)
No, that's one extreme form of Socialism. I consider myself a Social Democrat [wikipedia.org]. Many Americans and British people nowadays would call me an unpatriotic undemocratic Marxist who hates his country.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 01 2021, @09:30PM
If you're not socialising control over resources, by definition you're not engaging in socialism. There are many ways of doing this; enforcing corporatist decisions through the organs of nominally independent operations is only one example. But if you have individual enterprise and the ability to tell the authoritarian busybodies to get stuffed, you don't have socialism. Again, by definition. As close as we get to edge cases are where certain limited elements of personal choice are permitted within a broadly constrained environment. There are other sources, but we can start with the first line from wikipedia on the topic:
What you call yourself has very little bearing on the definition.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25 2021, @03:28AM
But they were just peasants. In khallow's ideal feudalistic society they don't count.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25 2021, @07:04AM (4 children)
1917 was in the middle of WW1. Famine and even starvation is a common occurrence during wartime, to this very day. Famine and starvation during peace time is not. The starvations under the social economic systems of the USSR and China were driven not by outside factors, but by their own internal economic decisions.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday June 25 2021, @03:08PM (3 children)
Yes, you can pick and choose events and dates from history. The Russian Revolution didn't happen over night. Russian peasants, ordinary people, had a miserable existence for a very long time (hundreds of years). The revolution was an act of desperation. No one is trying to claim that the USSR was any sort of utopia, it quite clearly was not, and Stalin was an evil sociopath.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 30 2021, @07:35PM (2 children)
Not so fast.
The population of Russia was pretty unhappy, and had been turbulent for quite a while, partly owing to monumental mismanagement (which led to events such as the Potemkin mutiny). This is true, and well-documented. The population was also under particular pressure as a result of involvement in WWI. This, too, stands up to scrutiny.
However, to paint the revolution as some sort of spontaneous act of a broken, desperate people is to ignore the very clear and deliberate moves on the part of people like Lenin, who were basically politicians - which is to say, power-hungry grifters with a plausible cover story. Russia had already emancipated the serfs, had already unwound a lot of feudal privileges, had already done a lot of reform of the government and justice system. They could have continued along those lines with a lot less misery and starvation, except for the bit where folks like Lenin wanted to be the top bananas. You don't get there by incrementalism, so a few eggs had to break for the sake of power.
As the saying goes, the name of the game is power, and it is a game which, in the end, is without rules. Which is why Stalin got to ask the question, when posed with the pope's protests: "How many divisions does the pope have?"
Maybe we can get Sturgeon to lead a people's spontaneous revolution against the wicked impositions of Lunnon.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday July 01 2021, @05:58PM
Didn't I say it was hundreds of years in the making? The Russian peasants were suffering badly in Catherine the Great's day.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday July 01 2021, @06:00PM
Yes, they probably could, but like you say the politicians took them for a ride. A bit like Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Farage and Trump.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @03:19PM (1 child)
I am here sitting in India enjoying schadenfreude. A day will definitely come when your investment in society will come to naught and some foreigners who labor the slaves more than you will come to your shore and own your cemeteries, destroying your culture.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday June 24 2021, @05:58PM
One day you might live to realise that life is what you make it [youtube.com] and that it is in your power to rise up out of the gutter, in cooperation with your fellow human beings.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Mykl on Tuesday July 27 2021, @06:26AM (5 children)
Great summary.
What Khallow missed when quoting me in his article was the context of my comment.
By hoarding all of the wealth, the 0.1% are decimating their customer base (because workers are also customers!). If nobody else has any money to spend then their businesses will go broke. The exceptions to that are government-subsidised/sponsored industries such as Defence, but any free-market advocate would surely shrink away from such egregious socialism?
So, in order for businesses to make money, they need to have customers who have enough money to spend with them. In the long run, you're better off paying better wages so that there are more people with liveable wages who are able to spend money on shiny new things and keep things going rather than gumming up the system by having the money only flowing one way. This would have to be implemented across industries, probably via an increase to minimum wage to avoid the one holdout benefiting from the 'sacrifice' of any other oligarchs.
Khallow is likely to cry "but anyone can pull themselves up by the bootstraps and succeed!". Perhaps, but one or two success stories do not solve the underlying problem - most people will still be poor and getting poorer, endangering the viability/size of the corporation's customer base.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 27 2021, @05:50PM (4 children)
Indeed. Also, this is a great example of the flaw in the argument that workers should be able to afford what they build. Employers aren't going to be able to afford employees who can buy destroyers or stealth fighters and would-be workers wouldn't be able to afford to work for the price of a few bullets or field rations. As I see it, you're echoing the demand-side economics take on labor. Give workers a lot of money and the economy will do well. My take is that this idea has never been proven in the real world and it doesn't explain the tribulations of workers in the modern world. Plain, old supply and demand does.
For example, the US experienced a significant hiccup in labor power in the 1970s. Demand-side can't explain it except to propose that somehow employers got more greedy than before, or that there's some weird trick like MBAs or subtle legal rulings that explain it. The supply and demand version is that globalization resulted in developed world exposure to vastly cheaper labor elsewhere in the world. In the US, that resulted in a modest impact on labor pricing power, including a large decline in labor union power. Similarly, the subsequent growth in US wages and benefits (including employer-provided health care/insurance benefits), which tracks productivity rather well, indicates that despite this global competition, US labor has done rather well.
It's time to look at what works rather than cling to narratives.
The supply and demand model suggests solutions as well. The big one is that if you want price of labor to go up, then increasing demand for labor, infrastructure (like schools) that improve the quality of labor, regulatory costs of labor, and other normal, low pain approaches that would normally be employed in near free markets work vastly better than things like price floors (minimum wage) and supply restrictions (reduced work week, UBI, prison, etc).
It also suggests that a lot of the problem of global competition is going away right now. The poor areas of the world have become much less poor and human fertility has declined substantially. Developing world labor just isn't as competitive on price as it used to be, and that price gap continues to shrink. My take is that by 2100, the places with the best labor markets and best prices for labor will be the ones with the best economic systems, not the ones throwing money (or worse forcing someone else to) at their workers.
Indeed. What I find bizarre is a complete lack of rebuttal on your side. Most people are poor, but they aren't getting poorer. That's reality. [voxeu.org] There's no actual endangerment of corporations' customer bases going on.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Tuesday July 27 2021, @10:24PM (3 children)
Your link is a reference to global wages, and indeed there are parts of the globe that are much better off than they were in 1988 (interesting that the chart stops just prior to the GFC though...)
However, the situation for the US worker is pretty dire. The increases in the 10th to 70th percent (developing world) came at the cost of the 80th to 95th percent (first world factory and office workers).
Let's look at a an analysis of the US numbers. Real Wage Growth [fas.org] in the past 40 years has barely moved for the 50th percentile in the US, and in fact dropped for men. Figure S in this link [epi.org] shows that wages in the bottom 50% of college graduates are actually lower than they were 20 years ago. The rest of the article shows just how much income inequality has grown in the US (more than pretty much anywhere else).
Globally, people are becoming better off. In the US, most people are getting poorer and have been doing so for some time.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Wednesday July 28 2021, @03:24AM (2 children)
The text preceding the graph "Total compensation rises with productivity":
There's something wrong with the narrative.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Wednesday July 28 2021, @05:24AM (1 child)
Your "Total compensation rises with productivity" includes the money that the 0.1% are giving to themselves. Per income inequality discussions earlier (and my second link) the amount going to the workers has stayed flat or gone down despite productivity increases. CEO pay, however, has skyrocketed.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Wednesday July 28 2021, @11:54AM
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 23 2021, @08:53PM (3 children)
khallow you are a clueless idiot
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 23 2021, @10:08PM (2 children)
I'll second this.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @12:22AM (1 child)
I came here to second this too, but now the motion carries.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 24 2021, @12:36AM
Yeah? Where are you gonna get 10 republicans?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday June 23 2021, @10:37PM (2 children)
Let's start by remodeling the Capitol. I have a buddy who is hell on wheels on a Caterpillar D9. In short order, he could open it up, and give the capitol a nice airy atmosphere like the Colosseum. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/Colosseo_2020.jpg/800px-Colosseo_2020.jpg [wikimedia.org]
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 23 2021, @11:25PM (1 child)
But, the Arkansas Capitol is such a nice building! What purpose would bulldozing it like a Palestinian home serve?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 23 2021, @11:40PM
The Arkansas capitol was the scene of Hillary degrading Negro slave labor - it's got to go!
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday June 24 2021, @01:19AM (2 children)
Quoted by khallow. I'm Famous!!!
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @04:10PM (1 child)
Very nice. Go grab yourself a cookie.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 26 2021, @02:05AM
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @08:37PM
The Republican Way