Can The Economy Ever Be 'Good' While So Many Don't Have Walls?

[pbrower2a]

(03-06-2020, 12:41 AM)TheNomad Wrote:

(03-04-2020, 11:58 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(03-04-2020, 09:35 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: Of course the economy can be good when there are "so many" homeless.

1.  "So many" is still a tiny number compared to the total population.  The economy can be good without reaching impossible perfection for every person.

2.  A significant proportion of the homeless choose to live that way over their available options to live in a home.  Why should we deny them agency to make their own choices?

A quick google brought up 552,830 homeless one night in 2018.  That is about 17 per 10,000 people.  If one’s heart is small enough, and of course you happen not to be one of the half million, you can ignore them.

We must stop looking at it that a person is not "feeling" when they have such views. 

My post was asking all of us to consider we are being TRAINED to ignore what is right in front of us.  I am unsure if folks drive by homeless tents/boxes with judgment, and every time they think "well, they chose to live there". 

I don't think that's happening.  Although, yes some ppl are thinking that, I'm not concerned with that person's view/ideology.

Are we not being sort of conditioned to think the sheer numbers are not "real"? 

Thousands of people in big cities.  Hundreds in suburbs.

ALL OF THEM.

There is not a big city or suburb where they don't exist.  How are so many of us so accustomed now to say "yeah, that's OK, we have always had "UNFORTUNATES" among us".  And no outrage.  Is it easier to do and say nothing?  Because we can't change it?

But we have an influence when we decide in our minds to accept "the economy" as doing "OK" as we have done for the past few years now, when there are that many people living without walls.

I'm not asking anyone to line up on the corner with protest signs although that would be a good thing.  Only keep it in mind when you decide in some election of some politician: "IS THE ECONOMY DOING OK?".

CAN IT EVER be OK in the situation described by myself and others in this thread.

If you're ignorant, do not post here.  There are plenty of other places to unfurl your blind venom upon fellow mankind.

Wise people recognize their ignorance and find it embarrassing. Maybe "the economy is doing okay" if profits, executive compensation, and securities prices are bloated even if millions live in fear of the elites of ownership and administration. But that establishes that "the economy" means only the elites of ownership and administration.

Let's start with the executive elite, a group that has come to resemble a Soviet-style nomenklatura in its rapaciousness and exclusiveness. As is true of all oppressive elites, no matter how egalitarian their promises were when they took over, they eventually tend to  pass down power through some sort of inheritance. Of course a college professor wants his son to be a college professor and not a short-order cook (if the real power is in the intelligentsia) and a physician wants her daughter to consider medicine (OK, law would be fine) -- but definitely not a hairdresser. Well, directors of the "Vladimir I. Lenin Steelworks" probably did not want their kids to do the dangerous hard work of steelworkers even if the system pretended to laud the worker in the "classless society".

Small business used to be the norm in much of the American economy -- in retail, banking, and even manufacturing; that is over. Concentration of industry has become the norm except where Big Business can't do well, as in small towns and among minority populations. Greater concentration of industry means more tendency toward monopolization (thus profits increase) and a narrowing of opportunity (perfect for keeping wages low). For most of the capitalist era, wages tended to pace productivity; that is over. To put it as cynically as possible -- business executives are paid extremely well to treat workers horribly.

I remember when the typical business executive was often someone who got a start on the shop floor, demonstrated loyalty to his company (I remember when the advice to young workers was "Don't be a job-jumper; employers see that as a sign of disloyalty"), developed some ability, and got ahead. By the time he was an executive his house was paid off, his kids were in college, and he was too old to know what to do with a sports car. Today the executives race from tailor-made internships to becoming lords and masters while sports cars still attract them. 

Today I see our economic elites no better than feudal lords and aristocrats of the Bad Old Days -- or in more recent times, a Commie nomenklatura.  I can say this: we have traces of a cultural legacy of either religious teachings or liberal education that demand that people in authority must show responsibility toward people not in the elites. 

So what do we do? My college major was economics, and my conclusion is that imbalances solve themselves in calamity: famines, depressions, hyperinflation, or revolution.