06-28-2017, 09:28 AM
(06-28-2017, 02:22 AM)Galen Wrote:(06-27-2017, 06:55 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: And now a distraction on the other side. The Republicans said today, "Medicare needs to be cut' cause there's deadbeats on it.
Nope, lots of working poor need it, cause salaries ain't what they used to be. The GOP is living in the past, man.
There is still that small matter of 20 trillion debt and over 150 trillion in unfunded liabilities to be dealt with. Remember Gary North's pie chart of federal spending. Entitlement spending will decrease in real terms no matter who is running the show. Same for defense spending.
The $20 trillion debt is your money supply, the petrodollars that fund the supply of cheap energy that allows people to take long commutes to and from work (like from San Bernardino to downtown Los Angeles, or Muncie to Indianapolis, or even Scranton to New York City) and a welfare system that prevents the sort of civil unrest that toppled Nicolae Ceausescu. The cash in your wallet is federal debt, as is the balance in your checking account and your savings.
Truth be told, we are into an age of industrial futility, when the manufacture of more stuff is suspect as a means of creating happiness. The direction of capitalism seems now to be to make sure that people pay more for what they get, as through adding more layers of profit as through legal loan-sharks.
Say what you want about Karl Marx, whom you likely see as the prophet of the Antichrist -- but he is the first to suggest that there would be an age without material scarcity. That age is Communism (not to be confused with the ideology of communist parties and movements that intended to rush economic development by cutting out the capitalists like Donald Trump who take a hefty cut out of economic progress as their vulgar indulgence).
Many people are coming to the conclusion that simple living is the way to not be sacrifices to Mammon. The technology of our time allows to live as richly as ever without buying so much stuff. A reader device available for about $100 (less than the cost of two cartons of cancerettes or four fifths of overpriced whiskey) can get you computing power that mainframe computers of the late 1940s could never provide. Those mainframe computers couldn't do word processing, dammit! And what can you use those readers for? Getting access to some of the great cultural achievements of about all but the last century of human existence free (copyright protects most material less than a century old). Even with copyrighted material there is much competition from new stuff in old stuff.
The two-car garage of the 1970s isn't being replaced by the three-car garage. The suburban 2-bath, 4BR use isn't being supplanted by the 4-bath, 5BR suburban house complete with a private movie theater. I remember the projection that middle-class people would all own their own aircraft. Sure, they do -- if you mean toy drones being sold as toys. You can collect hundreds of photographic images cheaply with a digital still camera or get a minicam and st it upon a tripod -- and pretend to be Alfred Hitchcock. OK, it's not quite that simple, for few people have the talent.
If you want to know what is making life harder than it was fifty years ago -- it's population growth. Maybe if America still had 100 million people, then people would have three-car garages and maybe personal hangars for private aircraft. Commutes and commute times would be short, as there would not be the suburban sprawl that allows Dallas and Fort Worth or San Francisco and San Jose to look like one spread-out city. There would not be as much competition for jobs. But we are here, and we aren't going away short of some new equivalent of the Black Death. or such a horror as thermonuclear warfare.
We have more talent than we have demand for it. Creative people must still compete with the likes of Hokusai, Beethoven, and Dickens.
So what do we do?
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.