05-20-2019, 11:32 AM
(05-18-2019, 11:57 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Housing costs are way too high, obscenely high in some expensive blue areas. I don't see that when younger people inherit them that they will sell them at lower prices just because they are younger. They won't be so young then anyway.
I think the cost of housing is part of our 4T. It is part of the economic crisis, which hurts young people the most. The crisis stems from the mostly-3T neo-liberal free-market ideology, in power since 1980. Now we have a governor in CA who is trying to do something about it. And some other Democratic Party politicians. I don't know how far the prices can be lowered for how many more people. Some people have to move out because of the high prices. That may also reduce the prices, but I don't know by how much or how soon.
The last 4T also saw ongoing economic pressures on the majority of the people, until the war got going. The specifics were different, but the effect was similar. And the cause was the same: libertarian free-market economics policies of the Republican Party.
One obvious solution will be to de-concentrate the economic activity (and government!) so that people don't have to flock to New York, Boston, Washington, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco-San Jose, and Seattle just to get jobs. People used to do well enough in places like Detroit, Cleveland, Rochester, Milwaukee, and St. Louis... that is over for now. Those cities all used to be prosperous -- and are not now.
There could hardly be an economic ideology more adept at concentrating wealth and power than what underpins contemporary America. Were I to give advice to youth, it would be to remind them that all that matters is that they make someone already filthy-rich even more filthy-rich and accept that what those ungrateful people offer you is nothing more than the means of bare survival. If you get a well-paying job your income will be devoured in rent so that you can live in one of the few places in which you can ply your intellectual trade and in interest payments for student loans to get the qualifications. Suffer with a smile, knowing that any lapse will ruin you. The people who really rule -- the landlords, loan-sharks, and lobbyists -- are the real power here, and toil is something that those people demand but must never be compensated well enough to allow happiness. The executive elites are on no higher ethical plane than Henry Clay Frick, and that they are no more competent than the nomenklatura of a typical 'socialist' state.
Narcissistic figures dominate in culture, industry, and politics.
Our institutions were built for a different economic structure, one in which business was mostly small so that the well-off could never become a domineering elite. It was also built for Christian ethics (OK, maybe it is not the religious identity that matters) that demand moral behavior even from the rich-and-powerful instead of indulging those elites. The only God in America is Mammon, and his apostle is Ayn Rand.
My brother tells me that he has met several people who have read her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and those people became @$$holes for six months after the time-consuming experience. I read The Brothers Karamazov and Les Miserables instead, so length is not the problem.
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.