06-23-2017, 12:38 PM
(06-22-2017, 11:01 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(06-22-2017, 07:57 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: But is Hayek an authority beyond criticism? No! There are valid alternatives on much that he says. Many find his idea that economic inequality is a desirable end repugnant. Economic growth that ensures great misery fails my humanist values.
This is close to one hub of the problem. It is logical, rational and tempting to favor economic inequality so long as one is on the rich side of the inequality, and so long as you don't care about those stuck on the low side of the inequality. The latter is a values problem. There is little that one can say to someone who doesn't care that will make him care. Thus, I wouldn't throw about lightly terms like insane, uninformed, or deluded. In many cases, if someone doesn't care about another, they will act to put others a bad place, or often fail to act to get them out of the bad place. They will do so in an informed, rational, prudent and heartless way.
But not only are they informed, rational, prudent, and heartless -- they are blind to the menace of class warfare. Although Marxist rhetoric does not apply universally to human societies, it can apply to pathological outliers. People can make great sacrifices on behalf of others, but when those others prove useless to them, the people making those sacrifices will quit making those sacrifices or turn on their exploiters. To be sure the exploiters typically see morality as getting away with what one wants. At some point people decide that they can do better without the exploiters.
Quote:I am concerned that things will get worse. As automation deletes jobs, as there are more people competing for fewer hours, as attacks on the safety nets continue, there will be more and more people hitting the hard floors under where the safety nets used to be. There is currently a brick and mortar retail bubble bursting. More jobs will vanish. I'm suspicious of the restaurant sector. Someday, people might remember how to brew their own coffee and flip their own hamburgers. As the split between rich and poor increases, it will become more difficult for everybody to get enough of a job for a decent sustainable way of life.
The music, video, and book stores are dying. Yes, we are saturated in trashy novels. Wal*Mart flooded the market with DVDs and is now doing much the same with Blu-Ray, just as it did with VHS pre-recorded video. Whether one really needs to buy compact discs of music is in doubt. What was once a lucrative activity lost its profitability. In tight times I found that meals out of a freezer compartment at a grocery store were adequate substitutes for restaurant meals. The cost is much less. I might not be a scratch cook, as that requires much more effort than taking something out of a freezer and putting it in the microwave oven and then cleaning up after the cooking. I am tempted to believe that the low-end dining places just above the fast-food restaurants (shall I name names? Bob Evans. Applebee's. Chili's. Chi-Chi's. Ponderosa. Cracker Barrel. Red Lobster. Olive Garden) are extremely vulnerable if the workweek goes from 40 to 30 weeks. There will be little between Panda Express and P.F. Chang.
The economic elites need the safety nets to keep a contingent workforce (as with such agricultural laborers as pickers) available and to keep people from rebelling as they get cold, hungry, and angry. Maybe the elites will offer politicized militias analogous to the Sturmabteilungen, Fascii di Combattimento, Arrow Cross, iron Guard, and the old American standard of the KKK to give meaning to the otherwise-idle angry young men... meaning coming from beating people that they are told to beat. So if someone disputes that the highest purpose in life is to suffer for the landlord or the sweatshop owner... then members of that militia can use the powerful argument of the appeal to force to eliminate critics.
As a general rule, pay must have some relationship to productivity, lest people goldbrick.
Quote:I'm not particularly concerned for myself. I spent a good amount of time in the software industry, and have a nest egg that will pull me through anything but a total gonzo collapse. I'm just not eager to see the total gonzo collapse. It could happen if enough people care only about themselves, not enough about a healthy inclusive economy.
I have the ultimate backup. I have contemplated that life can be completely devoid of meaning, at which point death is nothing more than the end of one's misery. i see life much like a chess match, and when a win seems impossible one resigns. I am not going to a torture camp or a 'corrective labor' camp. I am not going to an abusive clinic in which I would get a lobotomy. Life is precious, lest death be liberation.
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.