I assumed they were using hyperbole as no country has unfettered capitalism. All our restrictions on it in some form. My suggestions would be one way we could do this. There are others.
One problem is that most of your solutions have been attempted before and they failed to stick - e.g. a majority of people who are alive today were present when the top marginal tax rate in the USA was 90% (I am focusing on that b/c the OP referred to MIT), and when that was true, government programs were so well & sufficiently funded that we literally went to the moon! (but how often have we been back there since? granted, there isn’t much real reason to go…:-P)
e.g. people started hiding their wealth in offshore tax havens, only bringing in what they need in the short term to get by at any given moment. This relates to globalism as in how much is a wealthy person even a resident of any one country, despite them living in it 100% of the time and getting 100% of their income from it? If you open up a broom closet and maybe assign 0-1 employees to it, but file the paperwork for thus you can make anything into your “global headquarters” even for a multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporation - Amazon does this all the time, and moreoever keeps shifting it around to take advantage of tax incentives offered to them to move it there (for awhile).
Another way that people hide their wealth - Donald Trump is famous for this (among other things:-) - is to keep the actual financials low while still having the full quality of life experience. So he and his family may not “earn” much, yet still live in a fantabulous apartment that they value in the millions if not billions of dollars. Their cars, helicopters, private jets etc. also may not be directly “owned” by them, but rather by their corporate entity, which is subject to all the tax burdens and benefits of such - so even though he gets the exclusive use of all of his “stuff”, does he truly “own” it, at least as far as tax reporting purposes go?
Even UBIs have been tried before - e.g. slaves might be given their rations regardless of output, so that their families could eat even while taking care of the next and present generation of workers rather than produce work product directly.
So it is not that nobody has ever heard of these things before, it is just that they do not “stick”. e.g. Donald Trump, after taking advantage of that whole financial system, when he gets into power decides to defund the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), essentially the police who monitor for such excesses and abuses as he and others like him are exactly likely to try to get away with. (And yes, the IRS - the general taxation services & enforcement division - got its funding reduced as well, but that gets off into a whole HUGE tangent where it is not just its funding level, but direct mandates to specifically not go after the most wealthy offenders, or rather the particular style of crimes that they are able to abuse, which are more complex and can be held up in court for years and thereby take up a disproportionate amount of resources to enforce) And then on top of that, Donald Trump also lowered the wealth taxes - so both by making things legal, and also by reducing the ability to enforce certain particular styles of crimes that are illegal, he steadily moved the notch more towards “unfettered capitalism” and away from “placing restrictions on it in some form”. Nothing ofc is 0% or 100%, but there is a spectrum, and we do move along somewhere on it.
So, extremely unfortunately, it is not hyperbole at all - the most narrow interpretation of it as meaning equal to precisely 0% restrictions would be, but the common interpretation is to look at the spectrum and see the direction we are moving along it towards that particular extreme end, as in “more unfettered now than it was in the past”. You may actually therefore be in agreement with the person you are arguing with, but missing out on that b/c you keep talking about how to “solve” the crisis, as if the solution could be to simply pass a handful of laws and the problem would be over. However, pass those laws how - through Congress? And with the Supreme Court now having been stacked with judges that each day are revealed to be even more corrupt than we suspected in the past, ready to strike down any law that may cause their own personal quality of life to degrade i.e. they might receive fewer free rides on private jets if they displease the billionaires that they have befriended?
Well, anyway if you are speaking on purely theoretical grounds, or perhaps in Aussie land it may even be possible on practical ones, but in America we do tend to feel that we are well and truly and even royally fucked by the system, and any such “solution” seems unlikely to ever be possible to implement, for the simple fact that our overlords do not wish it. We may have come too far down this road, to the point where even the entire federal government cannot fight against them any longer, except in perhaps specific areas, but not overall, not anymore:-(. Ironically this illustrates the dangers of unfettered capitalism: I get that capitalism isn’t so much “good” as it is the lesser of other competing evils (socialism being demotivating etc.), but it really is like harnessing the power of this giant behemoth beast, whereas if you let the beast take over control then you can become well and truly and royally fucked…:-(. When riding a mount, one must always remain in control, or else… well, we are about to find out I suppose.
i.e. capitalism may be good, but only if properly restrained.
Capitalism is neither good or bad. It’s a tool. It’s the people that design the system that hold ultimate responsibility.
All the things you say about things having been tried previously applies just as much to socialism, Marxism and other forms of non capitalism economies.
Slow incremental improvements pay off dividends in just the same way that slow incremental worsening has made things worse.
I think faster broader changes would help more, but that doesn’t make them easier to implement.
Yes, there is a despair with how the world is worsening. We have a lot of things to blame for it. Facebook, trump tax laws, tax havens etc. Yet people continue to use facebook and continue to vote for Trump.
What needs to be done is fight and push for better candidates and better policies. Many are doing that but not at the level that is required. When was the last time you went to a political meeting? Or a rally or march? Those questions are rhetorical. I know I haven’t been in a long time. We have become complacent and despondent as a society. Things are harder, but also easier. We have lots of conveniences now that were unthinkable at the times you mentioned where things were subjectively better in the past.
Things were not better for women and minorities. Things were not better for child workers. Things were not better for lgbtqi people. Slaves were not better off by having a UBI. Please be aware that ubi means you have no obligation to work. Any income from work would be on top of the UBI. With advancement in productivity. I don’t see how society will function without UBI or cutting hours significantly. Jobs in transport, logistics etc will all go. AI will kill many more in communication.
Exactly - bad implementations of communism, bad implementations of capitalism, bad implementations of whatever utopian form of government we can dream up in theory, all suffer b/c they are bad implementations, even if in theory they are perfect. Beyond that, some theories may themselves just be “bad” overall, if the theory is too far removed from reality.
One problem that the USA has found for itself is having allowed itself to devolve to become a 2-party system, where no other parties matter. This is a fundamental phase shift b/c at that point the parties no longer try to accomplish positive aims, and instead merely try to “not” be the other side. Biden won b/c he wasn’t Trump, Trump won b/c he wasn’t Hilary Clinton, Obama won b/c he wasn’t Romney, or McCain, Bush won b/c… well it goes back many, many decades. Afaik, no democracy has ever survived that.
Nor does it seem to matter even, b/c regardless of who wins, the wealthy are in charge. School shootings are a perfect example of that - our CHILDREN are being MURDERED… and nobody gives a damn. I recall one poll result where 80% of the American people were for some form of gun control, and that rose to >90% of responsible, registered gun owners! Also that was a decade ago, so surely after all that we’ve seen since, it could be even higher? There is nothing that engenders bipartisan efforts in Congress these days - but 80-90% agreement among the American populace is astounding!!?!! However, it does not matter one bit what we want - b/c the lobbies want something else there, and they are willing to pay 10-fold more than the counter-lobby, hence children continue to be murdered all across the nation (typically in poorer schools though).
In addition to being horrific, that example also reveals that our democracy is beyond broken, it is no longer “democracy” at all, but a plutocracy where regardless of whoever votes for whatever goal to be done, the rich control what actually gets done, regardless.
So to fix something like that… assuming that it even could be fixed, would take… I have no idea. But going to a political rally will not begin to cover it. We may literally have a civil war coming up, or at least it is highly expected (among experts, it is said) to have some kind of “constitutional crisis event”, much like the January 6 protests where Donald Trump attempted the most ineffective coup that I have ever heard of, yet still was solidly an attempt.
And one potential reason for all that is that whereas the wealthy previous wanted to use middle-class workers to be the underpinnings of society - doctors, researchers, lawyers, engineers, etc. - now they gloves are coming off, and they would have divide the world into the haves vs. have-nots. That CPG Grey Rules for Rulers really helped me see this clearly, though also depresses me:-).
Yes, that’s a great response. I would disagree on some points but agree overall.
What people fail to see is that all these systems are just that, systems we use as a tool. Its up to us to design the system such that it benefits more people. However, those that design the systems have an incentive to design them to be reelected rather than what’s best. We need to overcome that. One way that can help is sunset clauses on bills. They expire after a set time and need to be devoted on. It should reduce the effect of interest groups, or at least require more funding for them to be able to intervene multiple tines over multiple years with more and more politicians and beurocrats. Basically, reduces their investment. Next one is term limits.
Its a great video, by the way, I hadn’t seen it before. It does emphasize why democracy is better, but what might be missed is capitalism as part of democracy is what also provides that extra wealth that mininoses the risk of revolt and increases number of stakeholders or power brokers.
Those whonarguse socialism or communism forget that there is still a ruling class working in their own interest and that ruling by committee is slow and inefficient. Just ask anyone on a committee.
I agree, the wealthy have an outsize influence. The wealthy is not one person. It is a constant rotation of power brokers coming in and our of power. Take the USA, the 1% is 3 million people. Sure, there are a large number who stay at the top and corrupt society with their interestd, but they don’t control all the levers. They focus their efforts on controlling the interests that will benefit them most, usually taxation.
Gun law is a great example of people wanting change but not having consensus on that change. However, much ofnthst change was thwarted nut the NRA using membership moneybfron the same people that claim to want change. We now know they also took money from Russia, in an effort to destabilise. Russia understands that a large mass of people effects vhsbge. They have weaponised it. Those seeking to stabilise and improve the world need to do the same.
The fact that Trump, who staged a shitty coup, is a horrible person and has clear mental instability is on line to be reelected is a shitty endorsement of current politics. That’s not the fault of democracy as a concept, that’s the fault of bad rules, like the electoral college, like campaign finance rules, like citizens first etc. All of which the democrats have not touched, ever.
I don’t see a civil war coming. Society is too comfortable(even if financially very tough) for people to revolt violently end masse. I do expect some form of constitutional crisis. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened after the coup. Many of the problems identified by that, remain uncorrected. If something is tradition and not codified, it is useless as a protector of democracy.
I think the complexity of society and the intersecting interests of so many people and groups is what makes civil war so much less likely in developed countries. I can’t think of the last time it has happened. The closest thing is middle east or eastern Europe, but that was fallout from global power struggles more than general unrest.
I assumed they were using hyperbole as no country has unfettered capitalism. All our restrictions on it in some form. My suggestions would be one way we could do this. There are others.
One problem is that most of your solutions have been attempted before and they failed to stick - e.g. a majority of people who are alive today were present when the top marginal tax rate in the USA was 90% (I am focusing on that b/c the OP referred to MIT), and when that was true, government programs were so well & sufficiently funded that we literally went to the moon! (but how often have we been back there since? granted, there isn’t much real reason to go…:-P)
e.g. people started hiding their wealth in offshore tax havens, only bringing in what they need in the short term to get by at any given moment. This relates to globalism as in how much is a wealthy person even a resident of any one country, despite them living in it 100% of the time and getting 100% of their income from it? If you open up a broom closet and maybe assign 0-1 employees to it, but file the paperwork for thus you can make anything into your “global headquarters” even for a multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporation - Amazon does this all the time, and moreoever keeps shifting it around to take advantage of tax incentives offered to them to move it there (for awhile).
Another way that people hide their wealth - Donald Trump is famous for this (among other things:-) - is to keep the actual financials low while still having the full quality of life experience. So he and his family may not “earn” much, yet still live in a fantabulous apartment that they value in the millions if not billions of dollars. Their cars, helicopters, private jets etc. also may not be directly “owned” by them, but rather by their corporate entity, which is subject to all the tax burdens and benefits of such - so even though he gets the exclusive use of all of his “stuff”, does he truly “own” it, at least as far as tax reporting purposes go?
Even UBIs have been tried before - e.g. slaves might be given their rations regardless of output, so that their families could eat even while taking care of the next and present generation of workers rather than produce work product directly.
So it is not that nobody has ever heard of these things before, it is just that they do not “stick”. e.g. Donald Trump, after taking advantage of that whole financial system, when he gets into power decides to defund the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), essentially the police who monitor for such excesses and abuses as he and others like him are exactly likely to try to get away with. (And yes, the IRS - the general taxation services & enforcement division - got its funding reduced as well, but that gets off into a whole HUGE tangent where it is not just its funding level, but direct mandates to specifically not go after the most wealthy offenders, or rather the particular style of crimes that they are able to abuse, which are more complex and can be held up in court for years and thereby take up a disproportionate amount of resources to enforce) And then on top of that, Donald Trump also lowered the wealth taxes - so both by making things legal, and also by reducing the ability to enforce certain particular styles of crimes that are illegal, he steadily moved the notch more towards “unfettered capitalism” and away from “placing restrictions on it in some form”. Nothing ofc is 0% or 100%, but there is a spectrum, and we do move along somewhere on it.
So, extremely unfortunately, it is not hyperbole at all - the most narrow interpretation of it as meaning equal to precisely 0% restrictions would be, but the common interpretation is to look at the spectrum and see the direction we are moving along it towards that particular extreme end, as in “more unfettered now than it was in the past”. You may actually therefore be in agreement with the person you are arguing with, but missing out on that b/c you keep talking about how to “solve” the crisis, as if the solution could be to simply pass a handful of laws and the problem would be over. However, pass those laws how - through Congress? And with the Supreme Court now having been stacked with judges that each day are revealed to be even more corrupt than we suspected in the past, ready to strike down any law that may cause their own personal quality of life to degrade i.e. they might receive fewer free rides on private jets if they displease the billionaires that they have befriended?
Well, anyway if you are speaking on purely theoretical grounds, or perhaps in Aussie land it may even be possible on practical ones, but in America we do tend to feel that we are well and truly and even royally fucked by the system, and any such “solution” seems unlikely to ever be possible to implement, for the simple fact that our overlords do not wish it. We may have come too far down this road, to the point where even the entire federal government cannot fight against them any longer, except in perhaps specific areas, but not overall, not anymore:-(. Ironically this illustrates the dangers of unfettered capitalism: I get that capitalism isn’t so much “good” as it is the lesser of other competing evils (socialism being demotivating etc.), but it really is like harnessing the power of this giant behemoth beast, whereas if you let the beast take over control then you can become well and truly and royally fucked…:-(. When riding a mount, one must always remain in control, or else… well, we are about to find out I suppose.
i.e. capitalism may be good, but only if properly restrained.
Capitalism is neither good or bad. It’s a tool. It’s the people that design the system that hold ultimate responsibility.
All the things you say about things having been tried previously applies just as much to socialism, Marxism and other forms of non capitalism economies.
Slow incremental improvements pay off dividends in just the same way that slow incremental worsening has made things worse.
I think faster broader changes would help more, but that doesn’t make them easier to implement.
Yes, there is a despair with how the world is worsening. We have a lot of things to blame for it. Facebook, trump tax laws, tax havens etc. Yet people continue to use facebook and continue to vote for Trump.
What needs to be done is fight and push for better candidates and better policies. Many are doing that but not at the level that is required. When was the last time you went to a political meeting? Or a rally or march? Those questions are rhetorical. I know I haven’t been in a long time. We have become complacent and despondent as a society. Things are harder, but also easier. We have lots of conveniences now that were unthinkable at the times you mentioned where things were subjectively better in the past.
Things were not better for women and minorities. Things were not better for child workers. Things were not better for lgbtqi people. Slaves were not better off by having a UBI. Please be aware that ubi means you have no obligation to work. Any income from work would be on top of the UBI. With advancement in productivity. I don’t see how society will function without UBI or cutting hours significantly. Jobs in transport, logistics etc will all go. AI will kill many more in communication.
Exactly - bad implementations of communism, bad implementations of capitalism, bad implementations of whatever utopian form of government we can dream up in theory, all suffer b/c they are bad implementations, even if in theory they are perfect. Beyond that, some theories may themselves just be “bad” overall, if the theory is too far removed from reality.
One problem that the USA has found for itself is having allowed itself to devolve to become a 2-party system, where no other parties matter. This is a fundamental phase shift b/c at that point the parties no longer try to accomplish positive aims, and instead merely try to “not” be the other side. Biden won b/c he wasn’t Trump, Trump won b/c he wasn’t Hilary Clinton, Obama won b/c he wasn’t Romney, or McCain, Bush won b/c… well it goes back many, many decades. Afaik, no democracy has ever survived that.
Nor does it seem to matter even, b/c regardless of who wins, the wealthy are in charge. School shootings are a perfect example of that - our CHILDREN are being MURDERED… and nobody gives a damn. I recall one poll result where 80% of the American people were for some form of gun control, and that rose to >90% of responsible, registered gun owners! Also that was a decade ago, so surely after all that we’ve seen since, it could be even higher? There is nothing that engenders bipartisan efforts in Congress these days - but 80-90% agreement among the American populace is astounding!!?!! However, it does not matter one bit what we want - b/c the lobbies want something else there, and they are willing to pay 10-fold more than the counter-lobby, hence children continue to be murdered all across the nation (typically in poorer schools though).
In addition to being horrific, that example also reveals that our democracy is beyond broken, it is no longer “democracy” at all, but a plutocracy where regardless of whoever votes for whatever goal to be done, the rich control what actually gets done, regardless.
So to fix something like that… assuming that it even could be fixed, would take… I have no idea. But going to a political rally will not begin to cover it. We may literally have a civil war coming up, or at least it is highly expected (among experts, it is said) to have some kind of “constitutional crisis event”, much like the January 6 protests where Donald Trump attempted the most ineffective coup that I have ever heard of, yet still was solidly an attempt.
And one potential reason for all that is that whereas the wealthy previous wanted to use middle-class workers to be the underpinnings of society - doctors, researchers, lawyers, engineers, etc. - now they gloves are coming off, and they would have divide the world into the haves vs. have-nots. That CPG Grey Rules for Rulers really helped me see this clearly, though also depresses me:-).
Yes, that’s a great response. I would disagree on some points but agree overall.
What people fail to see is that all these systems are just that, systems we use as a tool. Its up to us to design the system such that it benefits more people. However, those that design the systems have an incentive to design them to be reelected rather than what’s best. We need to overcome that. One way that can help is sunset clauses on bills. They expire after a set time and need to be devoted on. It should reduce the effect of interest groups, or at least require more funding for them to be able to intervene multiple tines over multiple years with more and more politicians and beurocrats. Basically, reduces their investment. Next one is term limits.
Its a great video, by the way, I hadn’t seen it before. It does emphasize why democracy is better, but what might be missed is capitalism as part of democracy is what also provides that extra wealth that mininoses the risk of revolt and increases number of stakeholders or power brokers.
Those whonarguse socialism or communism forget that there is still a ruling class working in their own interest and that ruling by committee is slow and inefficient. Just ask anyone on a committee.
I agree, the wealthy have an outsize influence. The wealthy is not one person. It is a constant rotation of power brokers coming in and our of power. Take the USA, the 1% is 3 million people. Sure, there are a large number who stay at the top and corrupt society with their interestd, but they don’t control all the levers. They focus their efforts on controlling the interests that will benefit them most, usually taxation.
Gun law is a great example of people wanting change but not having consensus on that change. However, much ofnthst change was thwarted nut the NRA using membership moneybfron the same people that claim to want change. We now know they also took money from Russia, in an effort to destabilise. Russia understands that a large mass of people effects vhsbge. They have weaponised it. Those seeking to stabilise and improve the world need to do the same.
The fact that Trump, who staged a shitty coup, is a horrible person and has clear mental instability is on line to be reelected is a shitty endorsement of current politics. That’s not the fault of democracy as a concept, that’s the fault of bad rules, like the electoral college, like campaign finance rules, like citizens first etc. All of which the democrats have not touched, ever.
I don’t see a civil war coming. Society is too comfortable(even if financially very tough) for people to revolt violently end masse. I do expect some form of constitutional crisis. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened after the coup. Many of the problems identified by that, remain uncorrected. If something is tradition and not codified, it is useless as a protector of democracy.
I think the complexity of society and the intersecting interests of so many people and groups is what makes civil war so much less likely in developed countries. I can’t think of the last time it has happened. The closest thing is middle east or eastern Europe, but that was fallout from global power struggles more than general unrest.