09-17-2016, 07:11 PM
(09-16-2016, 08:52 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: OK, maybe I'm one of the 'elite' sorts. My father was not a millionaire, he was a foreman for the old Bell System, a low level manager installing the relay generation of central switches. Well, he wasn't a millionaire until late in his life. He saved, and he bought every single stock option made available, and New England Telephone made a lot of stock options available. And then they broke up Ma Bell, and he ended up holding a whole bunch of digital communications stocks as the country went into the dot com boom era. He and my mother wound up asking each other how they became millionaire...
Anyway, I grew up thinking that if I got my grades in school and put in solid hours at work I'd end up OK. That's the way the world works. At least, that's how it worked for me, my father, my uncles, my sisters... Anyway, that how things worked.
Those halcyon days could be over, never to return. The elites may want people to fail economically despite their efforts. Money flows practically free from the Federal Reserve to those already rich those who need money in large quantities.
Quote:Reading Hillbilly Eulogy, there are folks who didn't work on grades in school, and who didn't put solid hours in at work, and who thought they'd end up OK too. They often don't end up OK. The heroin and meth don't help, but from their point of view it isn't their fault that they're not millionaires, it's the fault of Big Government.
No institution can make the improvident, lazy, and especially the chemically-dependent (add booze to the mix) successful. Even in good times children must pay attention to their schoolwork to have a chance. But if you are a white kid in Appalachia or the Ozarks who attends bad schools whose teachers do nothing to inculcate the value of learning, 'white privilege' is empty. One might as well be non-white and have parents who push one to succeed in school and then recognize the need to work for its own sake.
Quote:To some degree there is some fraction of truth in an elite notion that you can get out of the system what you put into it. If you end up as an elite, yes, you got something out of the system so obviously the system is working just fine. The world is what one sees of the world, and what the elite see works just fine. If it ain't broke, why fix it?
Donald Trump is smart enough that if he didn't come from a rich family he might have been a successful salesman. He might be selling furniture, cars, or real estate and doing well at that. Having advantages to which one is born might push one more quickly or further into one's level of incompetence. "President of the United States" is clearly into his level of incompetence, and he doesn't have a clue.
Quote:This doesn't mean everyone is willing to put the effort in. Not everyone's father will lend the next generation a million to continue the family real estate empire.
Most people end up with responsibilities to enrich the elites and few rewards for that, at least since about 1980. Class privilege can decide not only who gets the rewards, but also who gets the opportunities. The United States has become an extreme example of a class-based social order. That does not change until America endures some calamity that forces it to offer more equality in opportunity (face it -- World War II forced equality of opportunity as a means of determining who had the ability, resolve, and overall competence to meet the definitive menace to everything that Americans cherished, which may have allowed such people as Polish-Americans and Italian-Americans to join the economic mainstream). Until then, all that may matter in America is that a few people get to make gigantic incomes off economic rents and others work largely to pay those economic rents to their 'betters'. Other alternatives to resolving the issue of gross inequality include those elites getting America into a war for profits that goes badly or some proletarian insurrection.
Quote:But in a lot of places it is hard to get that education, to get a job that leads further than nowhere. I would agree that there are many elites who have lived too long on Easy Street who can't conceive of that reality. They have just never lived it, and when building a world view that which one hasn't lived doesn't exist at a values level.
We have more college graduates, and I don't mean graduates of junk schools like 'bible academies' and suspect 'technical institutes', than there are middle-income jobs awaiting them. That's not to say that there aren't fine religious schools like Notre Dame and Brigham Young Universities and of course MIT and Caltech. Connections are easier to make if one is already part of 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.