04-13-2021, 07:08 PM
(04-13-2021, 05:46 PM)Einzige Wrote: There's th Left-Wing Of Capital, i.e. Democrats (even very liberal ones like Sanders etc.), and the Revolutionary Left. And the two want entirely different things, even if a lot of the rhetoric sounds superficially similar.
I don't want a minimum wage hike, not necessarily because I am concerned with prices (there is very little evidence that controlled minimum wage increases correlate to price inflation) but because it reinforces wage labor, which is a social relationship with a definite history (e.g. most Egyptians, Roman's etc. did not work for wages as we understand them except when they worked for the State in various capacities) and therefore a definite end.
Money, again, is illusory. This is why e.g. I can go to a place like Laos or Vietnam, rent a very modest (<100k) American house out here while I'm gone, and live an upper middle class life - why will $700 a month get me a hovel in the U.S. and a normal middle class life (except for some high end consumer electronics) in Hanoi? I can literally pay for all my needs and a good few wants from one low end rental property here, whereas I'd need to own dozens in Vietnam or Indonesia to finance a life here. Why is money valued differently in different places if it expresses timeless universals?
Because money is not real. It is a social abstraction. You'd probably agree to the extent that fiat money is a thing - to which I would remind you that money was backed by all kinds of shit before the implementation of the gold standard in the nineteenth century.
The Democrats etc. are not about to abolish it. They just want the illusion of money to appear a little more pleasant.
OK, so economic happiness is essentially a ratio of rewards to the ability to achieve personal needs. Much of this reflects a cost of living that is obviously far higher in Japan than in Bolivia. But this also reflects the difference of opportunity to meet one's means in Bolivia or Japan. Costs of housing are obvious enough, as one can easily spend more than half one's "disposable" income on a tiny flat in New York, London, or Hong Kong and nowhere near as much in upstate New York or rural England.
Even within the United States, low costs of living may also correspond with abysmal economic conditions. If you want to contrast state capitols, Boston, Massachusetts is one of the most expensive and Jackson, Mississippi is one of the least expensive. A big problem in Jackson, Mississippi is violent crime because... well, Mississippi is dreadful at many things from poor educational standards to a very poor safety net. Mississippi is a good place to live if you are part of a farm family with a high income... but to live in Jackson, Mississippi means that one is much more likely to experience violent crime. Unless one is a police officer there could be no bright side of violent crime.
I am not certain that Americans are living better than they did their grandparents in the 1950's unless those grandparents lived in some hell-hole in the Third World or experienced severe deprivation and degradation as the result of Jim Crow practice in "Kukluxistan". The medical miracles are better, but many of those simply extend the stage of life known as debility. The main improvement that I see in life expectancy is that people have better habits than people had in the 1950's, when people in their sixties were still smoking heavily (and dying of lung cancer or other ailments related to tobacco), were not staying physically active, and when driving a car was far more dangerous. (OK, I want no return to Blood Alley roads; I can drive 150 miles more safely now on freeways than I could have driven 20 miles on the awful roads of the 1950's, let alone the much more frequent encounters with a BAC near 0.15). Technology? Are 200 channels of vapid entertainment and re-runs better than three channels on the Idiot Screen? Would listening to monaural recordings of classical music hurt you more than listening to the stupefying schlock recorded with undeniable clarity? Is e-mail better than what the USPS delivers? Do you really communicate better with a cell phone than with a phone with a rotary dial?
I've known people born in the early part of the twentieth century, and even if they did work that required nothing more than a "solid eighth grade education" they were often anything other than unsophisticated. They read books, which is typically far more enriching than vegetating before the Idiot Screen.
...Money is simply a surrogate for value, and it allows one to sell one's labor for cash and buy stuff for cash. It makes barter less necessary for survival (unless hyperinflation has so reduced the value of money that one wants to deal off one's pay as quickly as possible so that one has something). One has far more choices in life with $60K a year than with $15K a year.
Money is valuable for what one can buy with it. Such is a function largely of its scarcity, and woe is it to any society that grows its money far faster than its population unless it is getting some huge increase in value. I can imagine other things -- OK, tobacco was once money -- that could be surrogates for money. Most obviously, electrical power and computing power present themselves.
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.