11-06-2019, 04:11 PM
(11-02-2019, 04:24 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: I'm definitely better off than I was in 1979. Than 1999, definitely not.
The free market works fine as long it's actually a competitive free market; that's what liberalism really is. When the big guys grew to multinational oligopolies, and they started making their money from globalist exploitation instead of competing for customers, that's when the problems happened. That's when liberalism turned into neoliberalism.
Contra Eric, it's all the leftist billionaires at tech giants like Google and Facebook that are driving neoliberalism now. The Mercers aren't even globalist, though the Kochs are.
The market, such as it is, is totally amoral. If there is an inadequate degree of control on it, the Masters of the Universe ™ will take over and rule. Why? Because they can. Hyper aggressive capitalists, like Carl Icahn among the many capitalist predators out there, don't need the money. To them, its a game of who's winning the most chips. Which brings us to the rest of us, who need businesses in stable operating order to provide good jobs. But financiers hate good jobs. They want very low costs and very high returns. When they don't get them, they'll gut a company for the last available profit and move on.
We've tried this before -- many times. It hasn't worked then and it's not working now. Even at the very high rate of current productivity, only the very few are getting much of anything. Simply extrapolating from the mid-60s to today, minimum wage should be roughly $18-$20 an hour, and average pay twice to three times that. Obviously, its not. SO we have to do what our forbearers did, and unwind the grip that wealth has on everything. It won't happen overnight, and we older folks may never see it completed. So what? I still needs to happen, and the sooner we begin, the better.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.