09-08-2018, 08:36 PM
(09-08-2018, 02:35 PM)sbarrera Wrote: I don't what could be done to bring manufacturing jobs back for the less-educated worker; as the world economy has continued to evolve, it is the kind of work best done by robots and best situated in places where low-skilled labor is cheap. I think a large part of the backlash (as I put it) that brought Trump to power is resentment of this fact - but what solution is there? Economic nationalism as Steve Bannon put it (whatever happened to him?) can't resurrect an outdated mode of economics and I doubt it can stop capital from flowing to where it gets the best returns.
Manufacturing? We are going to need to turn to artisanship to soak up a workforce. Manufacturing is good for making things cheap, and craftsmanship is good for making anything distinctive.There will be no way in which to build individuality into increasingly-refined consumer goodies. Personal distinctions will be possible in such things as furniture. Who knows? In view of the inequality becoming increasingly intense in America, I am surprised that custom bodies are not again crafted for motor vehicles as on the Duesenberg automobiles of the 1920s and 1930s, bodies fitting the caprice of the wealthy buyer being fitted to a standard chassis.
Except in the poorest countries, the purchase of manufactured goods has likely peaked. Energy use per capita probably peaked around 1990 due to the demise of regimes infamous for profligate use of energy, and more efficient vehicles and lighting. Peak travel is likely nigh due to the trend toward telecommuting. Just because the insurance claims involve a hospital in high-cost San Francisco does not mean that the paperwork can;t be done in low-wages in English-speaking places... like India, Nigeria, or eastern Kentucky, depending on taste.
Quote:I think progressive policies - redistributing wealth through taxation, single-payer healthcare, raising minimum wages - are what is best for the working class. But Trumpistas have made it clear their priority is border security and ethnic cleansing.
If -- and this is a huge "if" -- the elite classes of ownership and management allow it. In view of the powerful resistance that the Master Class had against the slightly-liberal Barack Obama, I expect them to do much the same once the American people get so presumptuous as to vote in an administration that compromises the will of the economic elites. America has a combination of rapacious, demanding elites who believe themselves to taking everything.
The Republican Party has absorbed the economic elites of Northern commerce and the agrarian elites of the Old South, forming as purely reactionary a political party as can win an overall election in any advanced industrial country. Those elites would destroy democracy to further consolidate their economic dominion.
Quote:I think our extreme polarization definitely comes from the Idealist Boomer generation, who still are more than half of congressional leadership, and it will start to simmer down once the Boomers are in the minority. And I would say that Obama is definitely a Gen-Xer - he was pragmatic and cautious in his Presidency, at a time when other qualities might have served better.
It is the power of the Boomer Right and its access to sophisticated techniques of persuasion against the weakness of the Boonmer component of the usual left-tending institutions (like unions) that made such possible.
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.
