08-01-2019, 04:34 PM
1. an omnibus culture that can unite people across lines of age, region, ethnicity, religion, and level of formal education. Cinema seems headed that way (we are in the 80th anniversary of the most admired year in American cinema), but there is no obvious equivalent of the Big Band Era.
2. more reliance upon thrift, instead of upon printing money, to facilitate investment and the formation of businesses -- and consumer spending. Thrift of course depends upon people making real money for their efforts, which implies...
3. a return to at the least the real wages that people knew in the 1970s. Technology and productivity support such, but monopolists and bureaucratic elites take even more than the economic growth since then.
4. more reliance upon the liberal arts in education as a means of improving the lives of adults who might get something out of them other than vocational opportunity. The tragedy is not the welder who has a liberal arts degree; the tragedy is an accountant or engineer who sees the world only as economic metrics even if those metrics are people.
2. more reliance upon thrift, instead of upon printing money, to facilitate investment and the formation of businesses -- and consumer spending. Thrift of course depends upon people making real money for their efforts, which implies...
3. a return to at the least the real wages that people knew in the 1970s. Technology and productivity support such, but monopolists and bureaucratic elites take even more than the economic growth since then.
4. more reliance upon the liberal arts in education as a means of improving the lives of adults who might get something out of them other than vocational opportunity. The tragedy is not the welder who has a liberal arts degree; the tragedy is an accountant or engineer who sees the world only as economic metrics even if those metrics are people.
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.