07-28-2020, 02:23 PM
(07-28-2020, 12:53 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(07-28-2020, 10:05 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The late arch-conservative Milton Friedman offered a simple solution to pollution: tax the Hell out of it. I assume that taxes that he would accept on pollution would include tariffs. So clean up your manufacturing act, or pay the tax collector. Buy stuff from clean sources or pay for the privilege of polluting Third World environments that you never have to visit.
I could endorse that. Add it to the blue agenda. The elites will complain, but we shall see who is in earnest.
(07-28-2020, 10:05 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The solutions for stopping global warming will include giving much of what many of us consider the American way of life -- single-family houses, heavy use of vehicles, and much of our meat consumption. Maybe the realities of the last High gave many Americans the best of both worlds -- the spaciousness of pioneer conditions with the prosperity of industrialization. Privileged youth came to the belief that they could get whatever they wanted and could step on anyone who got in the way or demanded anything more out of life than bare survival.
Convincing people that consumption does not equal happiness will be a tough sell.
There's much schlock in a dollar store that I have no place for... even if I wanted it.
GNP is going up only because people are paying more for what they get (medical care, cable TV, phones, and utilities, and property rents including parking fees). They might not be getting more, but they are certainly paying more. Paying more for the same thing while pay is stagnant or falling is misery.
Smaller housing units do not have the space for filling with stuff no matter how cheap. Take note that miniaturization succeeded more in Tokyo and New York City than in rural America.
Where America is somewhat prosperous it is a landlord's paradise. Where it isn't so prosperous people are struggling for everything that they get. We basically have the freedom to choose how we lose as economic participants in a game rigged for our failure.
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.