Fighting The Fourth Reich

[Bob Butler 54]

(08-28-2017, 08:38 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(08-27-2017, 06:21 PM)Kinser79 Wrote:

Butler Wrote:Technology is destroying good jobs.

Technology destroys and creates jobs all the time.  If your goal is to have full employment I have a means that can facilitate that at the stroke of a pen.  Ban all farm equipment.  Everyone will have to farm to raise the food needed to live, thus everyone will have a job.  Economic ignorance is not a solid foundation for your argument.

Butler is right. Your straw-man solution is wrong.

We are at the end of the stage of economic development in which the exploitation of scarcities in material goods is an easy way in which to get rich. Many people dreamed of such a time, but it could easily be as rough as any of the classic transitions that Marx saw in the past and predicted in the future. The easiest ways in which to get rich are now rent-grabbing, cronyism, and corruption. Software engineers may be creating the prosperity of Silicon Valley, but real-estate tycoons are grabbing most of the wealth so created there.

We no longer need to keep up with the latest technology to be satisfied with it. Those who go through hard times do not upgrade; they use what they already have. I can imagine a scenario when most households sho0w when the family was last doing well, because such will show what technology was then in place. That is not to say that hunger and homeless are not real problems; they can easily be such, especially if the Master Class wants them to serve as spurs to working longer and harder under worse conditions for less so that the Master Class can indulge itself more fully. Again, economic elites that behave as Marxist theory predicts that they behave are big trouble in any social order -- the ones who at the worst make a violent revolution possible.

You do have to admit that bringing back the Luddite solution is kinda innovative.   (Innovative Luddite??? )  If modern technology is creating the problem of a post scarcity world, get rid of the modern technology?

It would force the industry made primitive non competitive, though.  All those jobs you create, all that labor, won't be cheap.  There was a reason to adapt the technology, after all.  I don't know that you want to make farming not competitive.  I don't know what industry one wants to throw under the bus while the rest of the world laughs and profits.  Ban robots?  Force labor intensive assembly lines?  Make everyone code in FORTRAN using punch cards?  Make America great again by trying to force it back into the days of tax and spend?

Shoving parts of the technological genie back in the bottle hasn't been tried much to speak of.  Lotsa luck.

At least to date, what Trump is doing from a historical perspective is personify extreme failure.  That hopefully doesn't become the culture defining regeneracy idea that everyone follows.  He might fit well as personifying the see saw, in showing how to hand power to the other party.

What happens if some important foreign figure dies, and the US has to send someone important to help invest gravitas and US appreciation?  You can't send Bush 43.  He has to stay in the US to avoid war crimes arrest.  Trump?  Talk about diplomatic insult.  You'd never guess what he would say.

But of course partisans have strong blinders.  They see a different world.