Has the regeneracy arrived?

[pbrower2a]

(02-10-2020, 04:46 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(02-10-2020, 03:14 PM)David Horn Wrote: The worst part is: extreme rightwing nationalism is getting to be a worldwide phenomenon.  The center stopped holding sometime ago.  That's certainly bad, in and of itself, but it may be a precursor to a more universal solution.  Brexit shows all the signs of going poorly, Trump is now irritating even many of the faithful. The Orbans, Dutertes of the world are slowly dragging their countries into messes they can't remedy using national assets.  So a good solid economic collapse could pull all this down without violence.  Any ideas on how that might happen?

Sanders or Warren getting elected would certainly give us a "good solid economic collapse".  Whether that would end without violence is another matter.

The two biggest economic collapses in the last 95 years (the 1920-1921 collapse was nasty, but I don't have an easy way of comparing it to other collapses) were those of 1929 and 2007, both of which resulted from financial panics in the wake of speculative bubbles doing what they usually do. Such bubbles, coincidentally having the sponsorship of conservative Presidents, devour capital while creating illusory wealth. When the paper profits show their fraudulence, the bubble bursts. At this point we would mostly be scared if the government promoted a debt-fueled speculative boom to solve our problems. Real estate is out of the question as an object of such an absurd boom for another seventy years.  Some other downturns (1937, 1958, 1968) have corresponded with the end of some big engineering project -- 1936 with the completion of the Transbay and Golden Gate bridges inear San Francisco, Hoover Dam on the Colorado, and the George Washington Bridge (such projects devour iron or concrete during construction), the Mackinac Bridge (plenty of overtime for iron miners and steelworkers until completion), and the Verazzano Narrows Bridge  between Stan Island and Queens. Boston'e Big Dig was completed in the late-middle of the Double-Zero Decade, so its completion may have  made a recession certain.

Nobody is pushing a speculative boom of any kind in anything. Trump's idea of improvement in infrastructure is that people pay more for what they get and the economy calls such 'progress'. A $20 toll where the recent toll was $5 is not my idea of progress, which in technological terms means that one gets to buy a 32" flat-screen high-definition TV for about $100 at Wally World instead of paying $700 in 1980 dollars for a 25" CRT television back in 1980. Paying more and getting less or being priced out of something is not my idea of progress.  

The next semblance of boom times for real estate will be an analogue to the late 1940's and early 1950's -- when the Crisis is undeniably over, and with thrift instead of money-printing as the means of acquiring the capital. Those houses will remind one of Malvina Reynolds' "Little boxes, little boxes... and they're all made of ticky-tacky and they all look the same". People won't complain because they are an improvement over the awful, crowded apartments that people had been renting for too much. Figuring that a High is a time that eschews big debt and insists upon pay-as-you-go financing instead of rushing bloated programs, we will have a stable basis for prosperity.   

So what was the big give-away program to the masses that led to collapses in either the 1920's or the Double-Zero Decade? 

Maybe it is the "little boxes, little boxes, all made of ticky-tacky and they all look the same"  that will be torn down  this time, and more efficient housing. replacing them.  That has already started with tiny 70-year-old bungalows at the end of their design life going bad and becoming unarketable as living space. So far that means big apartment complexes, and with those come heavier traffic that has taken away one of the rural characteristics of suburbia. 

So what is wrong with a big social program? It might not work. How can we know? The recent neoliberal dogma has been that labor must become dirst cheap and constraints against monopolization must vanish so that the system can promote maximal growth... never mind that the vast majority of people never get to share in it.