Can The Economy Ever Be 'Good' While So Many Don't Have Walls?

[pbrower2a]

(03-12-2020, 11:52 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(03-12-2020, 04:14 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Homelessness is damaging. The homeless are particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. They are at particular risk from meteorological hazards.  

Homeless youth are often dragooned into the sex trade. You do not want to be in that business; it is not good for a happy life. The suicide rate is astronomical in the pornography business, so just think of how tough life could be for a street hooker. Prostitutes are the most common prey for serial killers, and for some it is only a matter of time.

Many of the homeless have troubles far worse than a lack of housing, including mental illness and addiction. Many are violent people. When families get consigned to it, the absence of walls makes raising a child extremely difficult. Privacy works two ways -- in protecting intimacy and protecting children from things inappropriate for them.

We have gone nearly as far as we can with a paradigm that says that economic inequality and brutal management create wealth. Consequences include poverty and economic insecurity. The only way for things to get worse is if we resort to fascist or Stalinist labor camps even more destructive of the human spirit as well as of the precious virtue of liberty. We are in a saecular Crisis, one that requires basic changes in institutions if only to prevent a domestic apocalypse. We have enough wealth and productivity with which to solve all human needs.

We need to revitalize "flyover country" so that people think twice about leaving Cleveland for Los Angeles on the knowledge that Los Angeles at least has milder winters. Maybe if people weren't so broke in "flyover country"...  

Life without dignity? That is how we rightly treat criminals as a deterrent to dealing drugs, doing armed robberies, and starting bar brawls. But such can also be a consequence of an economic ideology whose fundamental underpinning is an ethos asserting that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as it creates, enhances, or enforces class privilege for the elites of ownership and administration.

Should I get the now-unlikely opportunity to see castles and palaces of central Europe, I will remind myself of the Eszterhazy family (Hungarian-Viennese aristocracy)  so rich that they could keep the most pivotal composer of Western musical history (Franz Josef Haydn) as a retainer. OK, so we have a great volume excellent music as a legacy... but how was life for the peasants? A feudal lord taking all the surplus above a starvation level could, if he had enough peasants under him, could live in a way that a more modern Rothschild or Rockefeller can. At least Rothschild financing relies upon the principle that the deal must be good for the borrower, and the oil companies that derive from John Davison Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company seem to pay well enough.

Much is wrong in America, and it is going to take solutions not of a political nature to solve some of those. Solid families will themselves solve many problems better than any welfare programs. Changing the tax laws to favor small business instead of vertically-integrated, bureaucratized behemoths will make prosperity more widespread due to the dispersal of economic and administrative power. Small business? What could better suit and reward the current and potential workaholics that we now have?

Now for my paragraph by paragraph response:

P1: Very self explanatory. No real response needed.

P2:  May really be only a matter of time before the next Jack the Ripper or Gary Ridgway emerges. The latter is the infamous Green River killer for those not familiar with the name. He was responsible for more murders than was the much better known Ted Bundy, the reason probably being that Bundy selected mainstream college girls who are higher up the societal totem pole.

I am reminded of one serial killer who flippantly said "I always killed prostitutes". Evil people can be as harshly judgmental as the devout. We need to do some soul-searching on what brings out the evil that can determine that some lives are not worthy of life. 

The serial killer has become rarer, most likely because police work is better. Matching evidence of a crime to a unique trait of a person, whether a fingerprint or a DNA sample, makes it far easier to connect a burglar (many burglars are rapists) to rapes. Most serial killers are rapists, so whatever catches rapists might thwart a would-be serial-killer. Offenders are being caught before they qualify as serial killers.  

We are going to need basic reforms of many aspects of society for America to be the best for more than a tiny elite. We need to make much horrible behavior unthinkable again. Our educational system must again inculcate such virtues as caution, empathy, self-restraint, fair play, sobriety, equity, and respect for learning. We do well at enforcing economic subordination just as does a fascistic plutocracy. Such demonstrates who has the power and who does not. Fascist plutocracy promotes recklessness, cruelty, elite indulgence, inequity, and contempt for the intellect. Does this sound familiar?

 

Quote:P3:  The fact that families have been sucked into the homeless whirlpool is especially damning. The nature of the modern era’s job and housing markets is also a significant factor as well as the trend toward more isolation among the society at large, ironically brought on in part by what is often referred to as social media.

When the homeless are people largely beyond help other than institutionalization (such as the mentally-ill) then maybe we need to re-open the mental wards. 

Honest work should be enough to get people a solid living, especially in a country that produces a huge agricultural surplus and in a time in which material abundance is easy to achieve. In effect, capitalism must work for people other than tycoons and executives, or it loses its validity in its current manifestation. We have capitalism without conscience. 

Wise parents know enough to constrain access to electronic entertainments for their kids. Kids need exercise, and "virtual" experiences are not valid substitutes for real ones. OK, such a game as Age of Empires allows one to commit virtual genocide (if one is so disposed) without ending up like this:

  

(Hans Frank, Nazi Governor-General of occupied Poland, after having been hanged)

Reality is that there are consequences in human activities. Virtual reality allows people to achieve psychic rewards without having achieved anything.  To be sure, some people need that -- but it can't be everything. Putting up a tend capable of protecting one from a cold rain while getting to experience nature -- now that is an achievement. 

Homelessness that results from extreme inequality of economic results most likely has its cause in the decisions of people to centralize economic activity to ensure that everyone works for the purpose of enriching, indulging, and empowering the economic elites irrespective of the degradation of the lives of most people. To be sure we have a conflict between decentralized individualism (which few of us can practice anymore) and a socialistic idea that all men are brothers down to economic matters. Ordinarily we have a middle-of-the road synthesis that harmonizing those supposed opposites with workable compromises. In recent years we have ended up with a synthesis that authorizes unbridled indulgence among elites at the cost of poverty and subordination for everyone else. The elites get to live the dictum of the amoral Aleister Crowley (Do what thou wilt) while the rest of us endure great hardship on behalf of the elites.   

It is not possible to maximize economic inequality without creating vast suffering. No technology, no level of economic resources, and no clever organization can redeem an economic order of such nastiness without forcing humane values upon it.       

Quote:P4:  Opening sentence: the brainwashing seems to continue. Another unfortunate byproduct is the increasing desire along with difficulty in creating some alone time, which I began to touch on in my response to P3. There is and has been for quite some time an increasing need to just get away from it all. The unfortunate byproduct of this is a much worse societal malaise than that which sacked the Carter presidency four decades ago. Not mentioned here buy certainly making the current malaise worse is how much you have to guard against the urge to say something impulsively, which will certainly get you that alone time,  but not in the way you want and will regret it later on.

The fault with all totalitarian ideologies is the inevitable neglect of the subtle realities of human nature. Consider well that much of the training of potential elites was to make them aware of the complexity of human nature and the inevitable messiness of human institutions. The liberal arts taught that  as economic analysis and psychoanalytic theory could not. Maybe we need to revert to the liberal arts as a norm in undergraduate education instead of making undergraduate education a watered-down graduate or professional school that the "Multiversity" became. It may be possible for the proles to get away with believing that there is nothing more to life than "sex and drugs and rock-n-roll" (OK, most working people are more complex than that), but people with administrative responsibilities had better believe in something more than primitive desires for economic gain, bureaucratic power, intoxication, mass low culture, sex, and material comfort (often sold with the fraud word "luxury"). So the elite Pilsner Urquell replaces the prole mass-market beer  -- so what? 

People in the position to do insider trading, accounting fraud, bribery, and sexual harassment because they seem exempt from judgment due to their position must have cause to not do such things. With privilege must come responsibility, and such requires a moral compass. Integrity must be worth the inconvenience; custody of assets must imply a duty to protect them from one's worst inclinations; one must assume that the cute secretary who looks like the Playmate of the Month ™ has no desire for a quick fling that reasserts one's 'manliness'. I have said enough times that our bureaucratic elites are becoming similar to the oppressive, exploitative, exclusive nomenklatura of the alleged 'classless societies'; power, and not ownership, is the means through which exploitation with human degradation is inevitable.

Real democracy disperses power, but homogenization of results (socialism) equalizes the economy. With some recent trends we are on the path to the infamous Third Way of irresponsibility for the elites and deprivation for the masses. Our elites have somehow melded the worst  indulgence possible in libertarian ideology and the extreme centralization of late-Soviet socialism. Libertarianism and socialism look incompatible, and no synthesis between them is possible. We still must make the effort, for what we now have is abominable.       

Quote:P5:  Agreed for the most part. A microcosm in one state is Pennsylvania, which has often been described as Philadelphia on the east, Pittsburgh on the west and Alabama in the middle. The national translation is for the most part self-explanatory with the exception of the area around Chicago.

Well -- there is Texas, or at least the triangle with the Dallas-Fort Worth "Metroplex" in the north, either Austin or San Antonio (depending on taste) in the southwest, and Houston in the Southeast.  Reputedly, Denver, Omaha, and the Twin Cities are livable. Atlanta would be OK if it weren't surrounded by Georgia... Salt Lake City seems good enough. College towns other than New Haven and South Bend are generally good. For example, Ann Arbor is about as good as Detroit is awful. 

Quote:P6:  Proof that we have been in Gilded Age II for the better part of four decades.  Not really sure if increases in crime are co-related.

Crime really is down from the 1970's -- way down. Police work is better, but perhaps more importantly, we no longer use leaded gasoline. Lead as dusts and in fumes cause both learning disabilities and poor impulse control, both contributing strongly to crime. It was easy to link environmental lead (increasingly heavy as one got closer to the core cities, worsening as traffic leading into the core cities got heavier and slower, exposing children in "tenderloin" districts to the most lead and stunting their minds) to urban crime rates. 

I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970's, and I well knew certain rules: one was that going north on BART except to head for Berkeley or San Francisco was a mistake if one was concerned about safety of person or property. BART wasn't the problem; the nearby Nimitz Freeway (then California 17, now I-880) was. Fremont was relatively safe except for people originally from Oakland who had been exposed to much lead in childhood. Traffic along the "Nemesis Freeway" got heavier and more congested, and as one went through Union City, Hayward, San Lorenzo, San Leandro, and from southern to downtown Oakland, the vehicle exhausts became more dense, belching out lead  that blew into surrounding communities. Poverty intensified the farther north one got, so -- Oakland was a place to avoid.  

    
(the map is to illustrate the geography). 

People have grown up for about forty years since leaded gas vanished from the marketplace, and crime rates are now much lower. 

Quote:P7: Illustrates the seedlings of what could erupt into modern day Bastille-like rebellion. But I don’t believe that today’s society would have the collective spirit with which to pull it off. A plot to burn down Wall Street and/or some big corporate behemoth? Might the corona virus accomplish this without any bloodshed? (Do not advocate such actions; just demonstrating that there could be sufficient anger bubbling under the surface).

Know well that economic elites have turned to fascism to destroy the liberalism that they see as the source of radical leftist ideas. Nazi Germany was a paradise for industrialists, financiers, executives, and big landowners
To be sure, industrial labor was cheaper in Germany than in any other European country except perhaps Russia before 1933 -- but after 1933 labor got really cheap as working conditions deteriorated to peonage. People could not strike for wages or conditions, nobody could change employers without the consent of the employer, and if one slacked off one would exchange the dehumanizing conditions of the usual prison of a German factory with labor in a concentration camp where one toiled to exhaustion on near-starvation rations that would kill one if one did not get out by establishing that one believed that working to exhaustion for what an employer determined was right (just enough for bare survival) was fully adequate. 

All that prevents such in America is democracy. Our economic elites are no more moral than those who backed Hitler in Germany because he promised them "labor peace" and the destruction of the Left. The concentration camps of Nazi Germany were highly profitable to the tycoons who exploited the workers so severely there. That we are a "Christian country"? Anyone familiar with the Sermon on the Mount recognizes that what our economic elites do is anything but Christian. If one wants to talk about Germany -- there was nothing wrong with the German people between 1933 and 1945 that Judaism would not have solved. 

Fascism, whether the nearly-pure-capitalist type in Chile under Pinochet or the militaristic madhouse that was Nazi Germany, compels people to accept the awful as a defense against the horrors that the rulers can inflict. 

Quote:P8:  No juice here. Right number, wrong alpha character.  Makes a lot of sense. Could it be that we could yet have a breakup of today’s corporate trusts like the one administered by TR around the turn of the previous century? Could it also be that the reason big business came to dominate pretty much every industry is that they brainwashed the public into believing that they could do it all better?  While it might be nice, I do tend to be doubtful that we could ever return to the days of mom and pop shops on Main Street. Much has been made of the decades long trend toward interests of Main Street being eclipsed by those of Wall Street. The reason a mom and pop revival is unlikely is because they usually  can’t offer the level of convenience that today’s society demands. Haven’t you all noticed that each generation seems to demand more convenience than did the previous owner one—from the advent of 7-11 and similar stores to home delivery of food.

Maybe this time the events will give us the scenario of "too big to save" instead of "too big to fail".  If the 1929-1932 meltdown was a tiger, the 2007-2009 meltdown that lasted half as long was a bad dog. When the behemoths are no longer around to flood the airwaves with advertising, and -- worse -- buy politicians and fund right-wing front groups, then the brainwashing will come to an end. I do not say that we are on the brink of a meltdown as severe as the one that started the Great Depression, but all in all we Americans got out of it better than we were going into it. The 1930's were a great time for starting a small business, mostly because many found that such was all that they could do when what passed as the gravy trains as there were in the 1920's derailed -- and burned. 

Much of what we think when it comes to economic choices is the result of advertising. Just ask yourself when you last thought of going to Montgomery-Ward to kill a little time and maybe pick up something; going to Blockbuster for a video; having a steak dinner at Steak and Ale; or buying a record (and at one point I started calling compact discs "records") at Tower Records. Those entities are all gone, and few people seem to care now. When was the last time you thought of looking at the new line of Oldsmobile cars? General Motors no longer cares what you think about the marque. 

Mom and Pop will reappear on Main Street (or perhaps at the re-purposed "dead mall") when the behemoths with bloated bureaucracies and with workers concerned solely with keeping their jobs are no more. The gravy trains of well-paid white-collar work with steady income will be gone. Small business at the outset is hard work with low returns on investment and potentially a good payback some time in the distant future if at all. But -- rents will be low as landlords will beg for occupants. Inventories will be available at fire-sale prices without the smell of smoke. Good help will be available cheaply. The work is sunup-to-sundown every day... but in a depression, work of any kind is a privilege. Besides, what else can many people do?  

Convenience is a myth when it comes to retail behemoths. It is self-service: the retailer (which has been so since the grocery store became the supermarket) stocks what he thinks customers will buy, stand back, and let the merchandise sell itself. This is the same whether the merchant is John Wanamaker, James Cash Penney, Martin Barton Skaggs, Frederick Meijer, Ray Kroc, or Sam Walton.  The merchant uses advertising  (which may be as simple as showing a commodity and a price -- "Hamburgers 15¢") to draw people in, and people find plenty of wares to buy. The merchant is there to collect the cash, keep the store stocked, and deter shoplifters. The merchant buys stuff in quantity and people buy on impulse with the understanding that they get their money's worth for something that they need. Or they buy on impulse. Or the customer gets a catalog from the "World's Largest Store" (the call letters of the WLS Radio in Chicago stood for "World's Largest Store" -- then Sears -- oh, how time has changed) and people can easily buy what is sold by mail.

The real convenience comes from buying a very specific item that stores might not stock. This is not something someone reads for pleasure, so it is never going to be an impulse purchase:

     

but it started selling at a faster rate once Donald Trump became President. I would suspect that a Portuguese-language translation is doing fairly well in Brazil if it isn't banned yet. (See my tagline!)

But this is not an impulse purchase:



Knowing that this is worth the time and cost requires some intellectual sophistication. The titles are mostly generic, so the only indication of interest is "string quartet" and "Franz Josef Haydn". Would I give this to someone? Of course! Talk about "golden oldies" -- the composer was born the same year as George Washington. That George Washington.-   

It is safe to assume that Jeff Bezos knows what he is doing, and he isn't selling books and music (among other things) quite the same way as Ray Kroc sold hamburgers. But one could never put these items on a stand and make people want them.  

We are in an economic crisis in part because the reality in most American lives has gone from shortage (which makes marketing easy) to surfeit. Many people are downsizing, and tiny apartments are incompatible with large collections of anything.