Well, NIMBYs killed microhousing in Seattle which was going to be the kinds of small, affordable apartments that people could actually afford to live in.
Yeah, that’s one of the problems with the whole “but that isn’t REAL Capitalism! We need to deregulate!” things. The regulatory capture that corrupted the existing process will also corrupt its dismantling unless you fix it, and Capitalism pays people to subvert public ownership of the state.
Here’s a conjecture: the rise of “post-truth” politics (defined by the OED as a process whereby “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals”) is in part the product of deindustrialization.
What I mean is that in manufacturing, facts defeat emotions and opinions. If your steel cracks, or your bottles leak or your cars won’t start, all your hopes and fancy beliefs are wrong. Truth trumps opinion.
Contrast this with sales occupations. In these, opinion beats facts. If customers think a shit sandwich is great food, it’ll sell regardless of facts. And conversely, good products won’t sell if customers think they’re rubbish. Opinion trumps truth.
(Finance is a mix of these. In trading and asset management, beliefs are constantly defeated by cold hard facts. In asset gathering, sales and investor relations, however, bullshit works.)
Isn’t it therefore possible that a shift from manufacturing to other occupations will contribute to a decline in respect for facts and greater respect for opinions, however ill-founded? In 1966 – when employment in UK manufacturing peaked – 29.2% of the workforce were in manufacturing. This meant that millions more heard tales from fathers, husbands and friends about how brute facts had fouled up their day. A culture of respect for facts was thus inculcated. Today, however, only 7.8% of the workforce is in manufacturing and many more are in bullshit jobs. This is an environment less conducive to a deference to facts.
Hot take on how method of labor influences mode of thought.
I hereby award this take one pepper for spiciness.
I can think of two supportive facts. One is that post-truth politics seems (I might be wrong) to be less strong in countries where manufacturing still looms large in culture if not in economics, such as in Germany or Japan.
However, many of the people decrying Post-Truth Politics don’t particularly care for the policies of Japan, and Japan’s politics are quite different from Germany’s.
“Capitalism with a Human Face”
In past ages, communists, socialists, and anarchists were usually reacting to a world in which resources were scarce in general as well as in specific and in which the situation of the poor in general was one of miserable deprivation. Meanwhile, the future potential of automation and robotics – machines which might not merely reduce the amount of work that needed to be done, but largely eliminate it – was not really visible.
Today things are… different.
It’s pretty common that I see far leftists more-or-less promising the following after a Revolution:
1. That it will no longer be neccessary for everybody to work, and moreover that people will be permitted not to work, and yet to have enough to live on, without needing to justify not working to anybody.
2. That industry will change to vastly decrease damage to the enviroment
3. That material quality of life and industrial capacity will not catastrophically plummet, especially not in things like medical technology
I think that this is… very optimistic. The kind of optimistic that no wise person would ever bet on.
Some far leftists claim that communism is more efficient and will do better than capitalism. This is unlikely. The Soviet Union did great things – industrializing rapidly after everyone else had a head start and after having the Nazis burn half their country – but they were just catching up to others, and they were oppressive, enviromentally destructive, and didn’t let people not work by any means. It didn’t last.
(However, in the post-Stalin soviet union, there were some labor rights that would make Americans drool.)
If you combine this with confiscationism and the intersectionality thing where anybody’s position in the grand hierarchy of justified people can be questioned, you have a nightmare: a society that continually eats itself, finding new classes of “bourgeoise” and kulaks and “counter-revolutionaries” to force into slave labor or just murder and loot, so that the Beautiful People can have their gleaming solarpunk utopia and their communism of leisure.
I do not wish to suggest that I intend to be the enemy of hope; our current system is unjust and needs to be reformed. We can reform it in a way that will turn automation from a curse into a blessing, and which will improve peoples’ lives now and in the future. But this will not be revolution but counter-revolution, and will have no place for bloodstained red flags.
Endorsed.
It’s not just this, it’s a fundamental inability to *identify* with other people and realize that *that could be me*.
Today I am 31 and healthy and always exercise regularly and eat well so why should I pay for other people’s expensive preexisting conditions and disabilities? Because obviously it’s not possible that when I’m 34 I might get diagnosed with an autoimmune disease or a chronic leukemia and need expensive meds forever. Or that when I’m 36 I might have a child with cerebral palsy who is able to live a full, rich, happy and ~productive~ life but will need expensive healthcare and ongoing assistance to do so. Or that when I’m 48 I might get hit by a car and be left unable to work full time, in need of assistance, etc, myself. Or that when I’m 53 I might get some random-bad-luck cancer (let’s make it easy: not even talk about how lung cancer does in fact happen to nonsmokers or how in any case it’s disgusting to call it “fair” when it happens to a smoker because that punishment doesn’t fit the crime you sadists; instead, let’s consider one of the myriad cancers that hits at genuine fucking random or by some familial genetic vulnerability the individual can’t affect) for which a curative treatment actually exists but it costs $260,000 and without it the prognosis is eighteen months.
Same applies to poverty. (And for some of the same reasons as already sketched, as well as economic cycles and industrial shifts and automation and so on.)
It’s this pervasive prosperity-gospel belief that bad things by definition only happen to the undeserving and trying to help people who experience misfortune is hubris and interfering with the will of the great gods Natural Selection and The Market and doomed to create more problems than it solves because fate favors the lucky because the lucky are deserving because Gnon because *blithering evil*.
I don’t know how to explain thermodynamics and free lunch stuff to people who don’t already have some acquired grounding in physical reality. I also keep saying that caring about other people isn’t the problem (Richard Spencer would probably say he “cares about people”). It’s caring about systems, some of which take care of people (and in a catastrophic failure would become unable to take care of people at all) that’s the problem. If you’re too nihilistically individualized, you’ll apparenrly fail to notice how systems fit together (and don’t). Screaming about it doesn’t seem to help, because systems still fail even when you scream at them. I don’t have an easy answer, but if the most widespread centrist position means ignoring Rotherham-type stuff, then fuck that too.
The economy is like the tyranny of a rocket equation. You only have so much fuel, the gravity between the worlds is already there and you can’t change it.
It is physically impossible to meet all the goals - there just aren’t enough resources (natural resources * capital * labor * technology) to accomplish them all.
American GDP-per-capita is above $50,000. Foreign GDPs outside of a few hyper-efficient places like Hong Kong or Singapore are lower.
If one person takes $3,000,000 to keep alive, you have effectively consumed the complete economic output of one person’s whole entire life.
But it’s worse than that, because our worker had to pay for housing, for food, for transport, for education, and taxes to support all the secondary systems required, and also raise a child to perpetuate the system. If all that’s leftover after all that is $10,000 per year, then any $3,000,000 case consumes the total lifetime surplus resources of five workers.
And I look at many of these cases and do think “fuck, that could be me” - which is part of why I suggested a wage subsidy program!
But a lot of Leftist or Liberal language wants to allow people to create unlimited burdens on society. They want us to pay for treatment while not allowing us to prohibit people from doing things that would require more treatment, or creating people that require more treatment.
You can’t have both! You can’t have both!
The fewer the number of people that require expensive treatment, the more resources you can spend on them. The more that need expensive treatment, relative to the size of the productive economy, the less you can spend on each one, until it falls below the level required for them to survive.
If is vitally important that society become more efficient and more technologically advanced. We must produce more, and more efficiently.
And we can’t just throw aside social technologies. If broken homes fuck people up, statistically, and cause them not to do well in the labor force, then the cost of that comes out of liver transplants, not just ferraris.
Socialist countries have a really bad track record of human rights abuses and a strange set of failings that are either specific to them or unusually prominent compared to the general zeitgeist, so you can draw decent conclusions like “don’t break systems a lot of people depend on, just cuz” and “freedom of press is actually really important” and “science shouldn’t be controlled by the state’s ideology ever”
instead people realize that Marx was wrong about something and the Soviet Union killed people and then go become tankies but for capitalism
I guess the real question is, “is it possible to avoid these known horrible bugs in Communism/socialism, or is it time to go look for something else and try to make that work?”
The vast majority of Communists I’ve encountered in person or online don’t seem to be trying to avoid the known problems. They either ignore/don’t know/pretend to not know about the historical issues, or they consider eg. genocide a feature rather than a bug.
It’s certainly possible to try avoiding these bugs, or dramatically improve the current social order, or to try and build some other system entirely, but then/instead you get people like @redbloodedamerica openly celebrating fucked up shit because capitalism is good and cool and therefore bonded labor is good and cool also, hence, tankies but for capitalism.
Anarchists say they’re against it, but I’ve never seen them lay out how they would prevent it from happening except to claim they wouldn’t have a state - but Catalonia had death squads, perhaps not Stalin-tier death squads, but apparently it did have them. I think the way to socialism now, the way to actually convince people, is to stop telling people to embrace a Communist revolution and instead buy up a huge tract of land in a country with a weak central government and demonstrate a real, working, unoppressive, prosperous model.
I don’t actually think they have that model, so I don’t see myself supporting Communism over Boring Welfare Capitalism any time soon.
All the NTSB recommendations are technically trade offs that have costs; consider American Airlines Flight 191 which crashed on take off killing everyone on board and two people on the ground after an engine separated from the wing due to improper maintenance procedures had cracked the pylon.
While 273 people may have died, the improper shortcuts taken during engine maintenance saved 200 man hours per aircraft! Why, the meddling FAA banning this procedure may have done more harm than the original crash!
Nah it’s alright fam,
If we assume that the GDP per capita is $55,000, and that the typical passenger has 35 working years remaining, we can just have the state bill the company and its shareholders $525,525,000 and put them into debt bondage and sell off their assets if they are unwilling or unable to pay.
Now you may object to the state rolling around and charging huge sums of money as payment for accidental deaths, but I have it on good authority that everyone signed over their trusteeship to the state rather than get kicked into the ocean, entirely of their own free will. Quite remarkable, really. So I assure that this plan is entirely Capitalist.
Yeah, you could probably get away with that until some proposal came up regarding abortion, immigration, or some other wedge issue.
On a side note, I remember reading something once about a Republican mayor who, as a partial solution for homelessness, gave every homeless person who wanted one an above-minimum-wage job cleaning parks or picking up garbage on the highway and painted it as a program in line with the conservative emphasis on work ethic. Like, that’s literally just a universal job guarantee painted as a conservative program. It’d probably be pretty surprising what you could get a lot of conservatives to approve if you frame it right
You know what’s going to happen the instant that becomes widespread is that they’re going to try to prove that the government is paying for people to slack off.
Universal Basic Income as the Liberal/Leftist threat/Overton shifter, Employee Wage Subsidies as the Conservative-compatible Compromise for a post-trucking world.
And then he’s shocked and horrified when people accuse him of being a reacto
The head-slapping part of this is that it assumes that the difficult part about running a government is all the gosh-darned records processing, and not the bit about maintaining the consent of the governed.
States don’t fail because they can’t process paperwork efficiently enough, they fail because the people decide that an alternative offering is more compelling.
(or more uncharitably: this is the most ignorant post X has ever made, and will remain so until X posts again).
Oh, Eliezer, honey kun,
Culture is a wave, government is a wave, nations are a wave, and they’re all a web.
Libertarianism is not the default policy position into which society falls if it isn’t interrupted. Democracy is not the default policy position into which society falls if it isn’t interrupted.
They are both high-level ideological constructs that require constant reinforcement and social, cultural, and material support to maintain.
The “war is good for the economy” meme just won’t die, even among people who should know better.
All we need to do is blow up Europe again, and also China and Japan and every other country with significant industrial capacity, and we’ll be good to go for another two or three decades.
I can actually see a possible argument here:
“War destroys an enormous amount of value in the form of lives wasted, resources burned, and infrastructure destroyed, but it can also break a political deadlock and allow reallocation of production within the economy that leads to increased efficiency after the war, as well as smoothing the way for redistribution programs to ex-soldiers that reduce inequality and boost demand.”
Like, maybe? But the fuckin’ annoying thing is that killing a few million people and sending millions of tons of shipping to the bottom of the Atlantic is a very indirect way of passing legislation and it would be nice to just do it directly.
Actually I meant that America was one of the very few countries with significant industrial capacity that had not been hit by strategic bombing campaigns reducing major cities to rubble. As such, it had a major competitive advantage in the aftermath of the war.
Most of the rival countries destroyed were already economically developed beforehand, so the survivors were able to reconstruct their advanced economies, which represented monumental growth - but only relative to the conditions caused by the war.
Now I’m wondering what if students could spend student loans on other things, like starting businesses.
So you’ve come around to the radical libertarians calling for voluntary slavery?
Just highly suspicious of the American student loan system! Like most American institutions it seems to neatly combine the worst aspects of socialism and capitalism. Why not just have regular loans (allow bankruptcy etc.) or just socialise the system entirely like a sensible country??
The money must be laundered through the private sector to prove that it isn’t Socialism™.
Nevermind that either doing it in a more capitalist, more socialist, or just straight-up better national centrist way would be more effective.
