03-01-2022, 09:14 AM
(03-01-2022, 02:21 AM)JasonBlack Wrote:Quote:We liberals are completely dumbfounded for solutions because anything other than 'more of the same' is out of the question. After all under neoliberal practice, he who owns the gold makes the rules. Anyone at all frustrated is obliged to suffer with a smile. So enjoy the short bus ride to some amphitheater in which a giant television screen shows you Old Faithful.at Yellowstone National Park. You will still be fleeced.
I'll respond to the rest later, but for now....that's basically every government ever. fwiw, I agree that the current system of simply letting the winners buy up the entire government is super shortsighted (I have never had strongly supportive views on corporations, but admittedly, I don't think I was critical enough of them in my youth), but, to one extent or another, the people with the money are always going to make the rules. Whether we're talking capitalist tycoons in America, apparatchiki in the Soviet Union, coal heiresses in Australia or kings in medieval Gaul, this principle has held true for a long time.
The question is mostly whether or not we can design a system with enough checks, balances and accountability so that power isn't monopolized, and there is incentive to produce laws that are at least decent for the rest of society. Rich people not making the rules at all though? That's never going to happen.
Some governments are far worse than others, and there has never been any social rottenness beyond reform except that has the backing of corrupt, cruel overlords who tolerate no meaningful resistance. We may be entering a pattern in which we alternate between left-wing (but impotent) left-wing radicalism because incremental reform (the pattern of the last century at its best) and highly effective efforts by well-connected oligarchs to tighten the screws until America is an Evil Empire that has debt bondage as its economic reality and brutal enforcement through a secret police beholden to the economic elites. That Empire could fall only in military defeat, perhaps by some nation that resists having such an order imposed upon it.
The best check is the break-up of monopolies and cartels. The US did such in Germany, Italy, and Japan after WWII, and the results have been all positive. We need to tax the Hell out of "easy money" to encourage small businesses that as a side-bonus will pay attention to their communities. instead of abandoning them for greener (meaning more lucrative pastures).
Even we Americans cannot afford to have people able to buy the political system. We may end up with lower economic growth and even technological refinement -- but what good is it if one can numb oneself with pop music from the finest new device if people starve on the street because they are no longer useful to the economic elite?.
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.