06-23-2017, 08:04 AM
(06-23-2017, 02:49 AM)Galen Wrote:(06-22-2017, 06:37 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(06-22-2017, 02:29 AM)Galen Wrote: Normally with this many special elections at least one or two seats should have flipped to Dims and this was one of the more likely ones. None of them did and it took a seven times spending advantage and over sampling the polls like the media did last year to get this close. The Dims still haven't learned anything and my guess is that their latest antics are in fact pissing people off.
I have often said that a fourth turning marks the end of an order and way of looking at things. My suspicion is that when future history books are written they will say that the election of Trump marked the real end of the Progressive Era. It looks like the next saeculum will be marked by the destruction of large entities including nation states.
My crystal ball is still hazy. Yes, a lot of Democrats are portraying the opposition as deplorable and getting people angry. See my notes to and about Eric. As long as the Erics of the world are doing their thing, the reds are just going to become more stubborn and ticked off.
It will be interesting how the financial problems in states such and Illinois, which have been run by Dims for decades, play out. It seems likely that the Dims will be blamed for this. In the west pretty much every national government is functionally bankrupt. This is a sign that the nation-state is no longer functioning combined with the general contempt politicians are now held. I would suggest a little light reading on the subject.
People do not care about the finances of the state so much as they care about their own finances.
It is worth remembering that regard for the definitive political outsider, Donald Judas Trump, is extremely low. But he has no idea of how the government really works. He has the managerial style of a crime boss, and he has no idea of what the Constitution says.
Quote:People tend to look at the world in a very linear way. Eric ... and Odin expect the centralization trend that started in the early modern period to continue and so believe the world will always be what they have known. When I see major organizations all exhibit similar signs of failure then it is safe to say that the long term trends are about to change. Religion as a major organizing force did not last forever and I see no reason that the nation-state, at least at its current scale, to last forever.
It is easier to understand linearity than any curve. Much of scientific truth is logarithmic or exponential, and there are graphing techniques that can make logarithmic and exponential functions look linear. So it is with economic growth in the take-off stages, as with Japan in much of the 20th century, or with compound interest or the profitability of genuine growth stocks.
Quote:What we are seeing now is that the always existing cold war between the tax-payer and tax-consumer is turning hot because the state is running out of loot. It is only a matter of time before the continual pillaging cause some kind of negative reaction of which I believe we are seeing the leading edge.
Misinterpretation. If by 'taxpayer' you mean the people who make such high incomes that they can be taxed heavily for normal operations of government, then such people are doing well. Very well. But those high incomes depend upon cartels and trusts... and very low wages. Note well that much of the economic activity is literally fleecing the poor through dubious services -- like payday loans.
If a society is to have extreme profitability for a few and very low pay for others, then there will be a need for a welfare state. Think of Detroit in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Anyone with a good body and a willingness to do some hard labor could do very well in an automobile plant. Detroit prospered. Workers in the auto plants could afford vacations in which they hunted or fished, buy cottages at the many small lakes of Michigan and have motorboats to get across those lakes or to favorite fishing sites on those lakes. If their kids preferred working smart to working hard, they could easily afford tuition for them at Michigan State or the University of Michigan, depending upon grades and college-board scores. There was little need for a welfare state when one could easily get and hold a well-paying job.
Today I see something very different. The starting wage at a Ford plant in real terms is lower than the $5 a day that Henry Ford offered for work in a plant that produced Model T's -- when it was producing Model T's. (Ford had to pay that much to be able to select the workers that he wanted -- no child labor, and nobody who wanted to simply work a short term and use the pay to buy some farmland). Ford wanted the people who worked in his plant to be able to drive a Ford vehicle.
But in terms of pay, Ford is a 'good' employer in contrast to much else. People must eat, get protection from the elements, wear clothes, and have the means of getting to their jobs. If they cannot get these. Many employers are delighted to get people willing to work cheap out of desperation. But if they are paid badly they must get some help - like subsidized housing and perhaps food aid. (Food aid is practically free to the government because the money spend on food goes promptly back into the economy). Employment may be seasonal, as with farm labor.
The state is not running out of loot to tax. The people with the loot to tax - people with large quantities of productive assets (can you say 'Donald Trump'?, people paid very well to treat others very badly, and some high-earning professionals are getting even more. Taxing the cashier at the dollar store, the housekeeper at the motel, or the counter-person at a fast-food place makes little sense. Food, rent, and vehicle insurance are big chunks of that person's income.
I see a pathology in low levels of personal saving. Saving is the first thing that people cut back, and something that they don't do until they can easily meet their basic needs. In the 1950s, working people could save some money. Today people can't. Governments can start taxing people about when they are ready to save. They can also tax the Master Class that really has a stake in the system. They have a huge stake, for in the event of a proletarian revolution they stand to lose everything -- including their lives if they don't simply abandon what property and privilege they have. Even before he made his ludicrous excursion from bad businessman into quack politician, Donald Trump was the classic example of someone who would have been the first to be taken to a wall to be shot by revolutionaries who sought to destroy capitalist privilege and power.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.