03-01-2021, 12:43 PM
(02-27-2021, 01:05 PM)Einzige Wrote:(02-27-2021, 12:56 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(02-27-2021, 10:26 AM)Einzige Wrote: What you want is a petit-bourgeois small proprietorship utopia. Your opinions are nothing more than the expression of your class interest. Also, Maslow's hierarchy is now widely regarded as pseudoscience.
I can think of far worse than a petit-bourgeois small proprietorship utopia, like a feudal reality in which every one is born into unshakable roles that any attempt to escape is treated as a crime. It is better that those who own the assets not wield the economic power as is true in the plutocracy in which we live.
That feudal reality is what the drive to attain the petit-bourgeois small proprietorship utopia actually achieves.
Do you want to know the dirty little secret? The rottenness of our economic order depends upon a super-abundance of energetic young people who know that just to survive they must make people already filthy rich even more filthy rich while remaining poor. Young adults find few opportunities unless they have family connections, and the established elites have highly-profitable models that depend upon people buying over-priced and questionable services, or people working themselves to exhaustion for little pay. We all know about the fast-food business and "casual dining".
Consider that we have largely gone from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. Many of the services (pre-paid legal services, timeshare vacation plans, over-priced cable TV, rent-to-own marketing, gym memberships or dance-lesson plans that they don't use, and predatory lending). All of these are vulnerable in any economic downturn. People find that they can do without something and try to sell it off if they have some alleged value or quit spending the money. A prime example was golf-course memberships that people could afford when the economy was humming along... but it was easy to not renew. Golf might not be a classic rip-off, but it is a luxury.
Pre-paid legal services make sense if one has assets or a career at risk. Some kid might think that the teacher has a crush on him or her and build the fantasy into a case of sexual harassment. But if one loses the assets, what can a legal defense do one? We do not have debtors' prisons anymore unless for non-payment of child support or taxes. Visit Hawaii and you will get a little something for attending some lecture on how great it would be to visit every year (truth be told -- Hawaii is boring. My parents visited there once and did not go back). A time-share is a tiny apartment with beach access. So what! Michigan has plenty of beach access and it is delightful for six months of the year (late April to late October) and iffy for roughly another month (mid-April and late October and early November, as the state has some spectacular fall foliage... New England without the mountains). Michigan winters are nasty, but one can rely upon inside entertainment then or take about a two-day drive for some relief. For Michiganders who hate the bleak, snowy winters, relief is spelled
F-L-O-R-I-D-A
...People lose their jobs, and they cancel the rent-to-own plans. Maybe they quit paying on the jalopy that they bought from a tote-the-note lot. They cut the cable and rely upon books and video from the local library. Gym memberships? Not renewed. Overpriced I-phone and service plan? There are pre-paid phone plans for poor people, resembling the old measured service that one used to get on a land-line. You will need one for applying for work, but make sure to constrain your talking time. Rent-to-own? You don't get ownership until you have paid for a new Cadillac and ended up with a Yugo that is grossly obsolete and worn out.
The factory used to be the most reliable way of getting a middle-income life (factories were everywhere, and people could get jobs locally without having to go to the giant city unless working for the giant auto or aerospace plant) without having to get a college degree. But what does one do with a college degree now? Quite often the sort of work that one did to put one through college. So you have a degree in history... and you are still a barista. You might be one for another ten years. Or maybe you apply yourself selling questionable products like cable TV for $200 a month. When cable is overpriced, people often realize that they are no happier with cable-TV than their great-grandparents were with books that leave something to the imagination. Or sell people an overpriced telephone plan. Or sell time-share property. Maybe you sell cars at a tote-the-note lot that is more profitable than a new-car dealership because the entity sells a car with perhaps two years of life remaining at 40% interest where you make "convenient weekly payments" that, if you miss them, the lot-owner still has a key to your car and can drive it away. So the car breaks down? No problem. Get another one good for perhaps two more years at 40% interest.
There are opportunities in the initial raw deal that is the norm in about every aspect of hypermodern capitalism that makes the old sort look more attractive. (History is cyclical and it is not always onward and upward). One can be overworked and underpaid and believe that holding onto a job that nobody else wants is security... until the Big Bosses decide that some other place has even-cheaper labor. One can make the original raw deal that rips off a customer by selling a questionable or overpriced commodity and go through intellectual contortions to try to retain customers whom one must convince that abandoning something inadequate is either too difficult, harmful, or wrong. American workers are underpaid, so they can no longer save for a dream; they must sell their soul to the company store just to keep going.
We have been through an ugly time for working people, quite possibly the worst in American history. At the least the Gilded Age was a time of innovation in economic life. The neocon era has been one of limiting opportunity and gouging the customer as much as possible -- and committing people to miserable roles in life while telling people to count their blessings. Oh you have run out of blessings to count? Then start over with the count. Or maybe remember to be thankful that you aren't in North Korea, Afghanistan, Syria, or whatever nightmare then exists.
What began with Reagan may have died in Trump. The only problem is that forty years is a whole time in the workforce, which is probably so for people born from about 1955 to about 1970. Be born early in that range, and you were ill-prepared (you may have had GI-like assumptions about life) for the era of maximal inequality and least opportunity. Be born fairly late and things start to improve about as you approach retirement age and have yet to salt much away. Either way, hope that your children are fond enough of you to take you in when you can no longer work in what is available.
Capitalism is not the problem. Pathological elites are, and the narcissistic creeps who made a monstrosity of private-sector entities would have been no less creepy @$$holes under a 'socialist' order. America's executive elite is much the same as the old Soviet nomenklatura. Tycoons, urban landlords (where the economy is at all vibrant), and large-scale farmers are no better than the magnates of feudal times. Creative people create assets on behalf of such entities as Sony, Warner, Disney, CBS-Paramount-Viacom, and Comcast -- so they can't really share. They might do well and even get gaudy, but that is it. If you are thinking of criminals -- then Mafia-like groups are the worst of all.
I doubt that you have read Piketty, and as someone who really has read Capital, I see Piketty as practically writing a sequel that recognizes technological and social change that has followed Marx' depiction of an era now no more. Piketty sees contemporary capitalism as having elites too large and too demanding. Elites taking everything that they can is hardly new, and that has always been a social menace. That is the contemporary problem. Such people can mess up socialism and capitalism alike.
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.