ACA Repeal/Replace: Progressives Face Moral Dilemma

[Bob Butler 54]

Kinser

One can store energy by lifting weights.  Battery technology is improving.  You might be right in mentioning nuclear, but I can’t judge how the technology will fall out yet.  Thus…  the question mark.

Labor being replaced by automation is a very mixed blessing.  The old model suggests most folk work for a living.  The fewer jobs, the further from full employment, the more stressed the old model becomes.  I don’t think anyone would be eager to put a large portion of the population on the dole.  One might try stronger minimum wages, shorter work weeks and earlier retirement ages.  Jobs providing opportunity to work, and thus get society’s rewards, might become a critical shortage.

Improved efficiency shouldn’t be a bad thing.  We ought to be able to produce enough stuff to go around.  The difficulty is coming up with an economic scheme where everyone has a decent shot at a piece of the pie.  The two approaches seem to be lots of folks on the dole, or creating more jobs by letting several people do the work one person used to do, by reducing the number of hours the typical worker does.  I’d like to look at the reduce hours alternative.

Aligning with the winning side puts you with the establishment robber barons three turnings out of four.  The establishment elites usually get their way.  The exception would be the crisis.  The robber barons arranging things for the benefit of the robber barons creates inequality of wealth and power.  Eventually, enough is enough, and there tends to be a crisis.  At that point, the elite ruling class has some scrambling to do.  The nobles and slave owners were taken out.  The robber barons?  I expect at some point their influence will have to be brutally trimmed.  It’s not time to start holding one’s breath.  If you hook your wagon to the robber barons, you’ll do well for a while yet.

My retirement funds are in the market.  I suppose if I were entirely selfish, I ought to root for the established pattern as well.  What’s good for the robber barons might hopefully be not bad for my mutual funds.  Selfishly, I don’t want a huge wealth destroying Great Crash.  

Ideals, though, can be selfish.  Ideals say one works together for the common good to share the wealth and produce stability.  To the extant that we can produce a sustainable inclusive economy, we might not have to see revolution, civil war, economic collapse and other unpleasantness.  If the crisis can’t be avoided, if the current economic scheme must go, if the robber barons cling to the old scene out of self interested but are doomed to fall, then I want a new economic scheme waiting in the wings.  Tearing down without being ready to replace the old with something better isn’t my way.

The dominant issues the blue boomers pushed in the last awakening were anti domino theory war, racial equality, gender equality and the environment.  Those who would as soon disparage the boomers focus on cultural issues rather than the ideals and issues.  Both culture and issues were there.  What seems unique about the 1960s awakening was that the new prophets didn’t just propose a new set of values and ideals which were implemented in the following crisis.  The GIs were so much into solving problems that they implemented much of what the boomers were loudly demanding.  This is part of why I think the 1960s was as much a crisis as an awakening.  Stuff got done, with more credit to the GIs than to the boomers.

Humans are not equal in capability, but should have equality of opportunity.  Our culture includes prejudices and privileges by race, culture and gender.  They are going away slowly.  I would like to see them continue to fade.

We haven’t had a clear society transforming regeneracy and crisis.  False regeneracies, micro turnings, whatever you’d care to call them, sure.  New ideas are tried, fail to win the approval a new dominant culture, thus they get abandoned and overturned by the next administration.  We’ve had nothing happen since the awakening vaguely similar in scope to prior crises… adopting democracy, achieving independence from Britain, abandoning the slave economy, the government assuming responsibility to regulate the economy, or switching from traditional isolation to becoming the world’s policeman.

Thus, red and blue matters.  The ideas of either faction when implemented without a true mandate strengthens the other faction.  The party in charge keeps switching, undoing whatever ‘progress’ the other side attempts to make.  The pendulum may be a key dynamic that has broken S&H’s four stroke pattern.

Does Trump have the people skills to hold together a working coalition, or will his narcissism cause things to fall well and truly apart?  Will he manage to keep his act together though the mid term elections?  These to me are two important pendulum questions that I can’t definitively answer yet.  The answers to these questions determine if the pendulum will start swinging the other way, how soon, and how strongly.