Conservatives have so much fucking nerve talking about how “ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS ARE OUT OF CONTROL” when absolutely no-one feels inconvenienced by them or has ever even encountered them in their personal lives unless they’re the CEO’s of a megaconglomerate bitter that they couldn’t rip up a national park and buy like their fifth house boat
Yeah, it’s literally the Kochs saying “It’s so UNFAIR that when the oil pipelines we own but don’t maintain bust and flood a town with toxic sludge, that WE have to pay to fix it.” and “An employee we forced to clean chemical storage tanks without the proper gear for 15 years developed cancer, and they’re allowed to sue us over it? TYRANNY!!”
How is it never occurred to me to put it like this before?
this honestly comes off as pretty silly and out-of-touch, because there are of course plenty of people who get laid off in industries that are subject to environmental regulations, and while it’s certainly possible to make an empirical case that, say, coal regulations have little to do with the decline of coal jobs, it’s at least plausible that there is some effect.
of course the solution to this is that you need a full employment economy so that losing any particular job doesn’t mean losing a job, period, but until you do so (and obviously there are general capitalist interests against having a genuinely full employment economy outside of wartime) there will be entirely understandable resistance among certain fractions of labor against things (environmental regulations, immigration, labor-saving machinery) that are extremely good in themselves
I would argue against immigration being a general good in itself, but…
Wage subsidies with low minimum wage would get us pretty close to full employment without harming workers (in terms of net income) or crashing the economy (it has support from economists).
Admittedly I’m kind of a broken record, here, but it seems like something that could actually happen without a revolution and without potentially ruining everything.