11-06-2019, 11:58 PM
(11-02-2019, 08:23 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(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.
Yes, but I wouldn't call these guys "leftists" anymore, although they might contribute to Democrats.
Yes, neoliberalism is globalist exploitation, but it's also the domestic kind. But libertarian economics (aka neo-liberalism) automatically turns into oligopoly, unless regulated. That's how it goes. The big guys eat up the little guys in short order.
Any idea that freedom depends on the market is neo-liberalism.
Somebody tell Terror-Marie not to eat so much popcorn. It's not good fer ya.
We have a conflict between high-tech plutocrats who seem to need some sophistication among their customers and old industry that doesn't. When the elites are not in conflict, then there is some freedom. When those elites operate in lockstep, there is none. The Unified Right formed when Southern agrarians and Northern industrialists formed a coalition able to flood the political process.
If we want real freedom in the next Turning, then we will need to reduce the concentration of economic and bureaucratic power. People such as the Old Order Amish reject technologies that they consider harmful to their ways. (I would not reject much of what they reject).
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.