01-28-2020, 06:00 PM
(01-28-2020, 04:38 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(01-28-2020, 03:30 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Oh, really? They decide what politicians and political causes get the campaign funds, and those politicians and cases are the ones most amenable to the class interests of our economic elites -- cheap labor toiling under brutal management, lax regulation, monopolized markets, low taxes, wars for profit, and privatization of everything possible. They seek whatever they can get away with, and that means possibly things not quite nasty enough to provoke a proletarian revolution.Life simply gets harder, and for what?
With liberals, life gets better as technology advances. People get better pay and working conditions instead of being squeezed as workers and bled as consumers. I question that we are more reckless with personal spending; we are just as capable of savings and investment as right-wingers. (If anything, those "investors" are more likely to get fleeced in hustles of coins and precious metals as are people on the Right. I actually made some good investments in the spring of 2009... and it is a good thing that I did because those at least bought me a car when I lost everything else with my father in a nursing home).
People with solid income can spend everything that they have -- but people with low incomes can only deny themselves what they want. We liberals do not all have the same culture (as should be shown in our ethnic diversity). Honest pay for honest work is the best that most people can hope for -- but that is adequate so long as one has skills.
Oh, by the way -- Donald Trump is a horrible person. You misread me when I said that I "fired" his bad TV (The Apprentice) show with my remote control much as I could "fire" a baseball game on the air when one team is down 10-2 in the fourth inning. I have never been an employee of Donald Trump or been on his TV show. I prefer to be around people who don't brag about grabbing women by their "kitty-cats". Trump has proved too amoral, immoral, and narcissistic to be a desirable President. I do not blame him for my economic hardships. I blame a disability.
The cheap labor (cheap illegal immigrant labor and cheap foreign labor here and abroad) are mainly on your side and being largely protected and politically represented by your side these days. You bought in even though you'll never see the financial benefits that your so called elites, politicians and their corrupt officials are going to receive from the economic elites supporting your side. I mean, Bloomberg is going to invest a billion in the effort to defeat Trump and kill phase II of the Chinese trade deal for China these days. You guys and your insatiable need for a liberal white knight and a liberal government to protect you from evil Donald Trump and the evil Tea Party these days. Chuckle, chuckle. What a joke, they have you pegged too. You'd have to pack up and move to a sanctuary state to receive some sort of benefit from those taking advantage of them. I don't employ cheap illegal or do business with cheap immigrant labor. I employ Americans who aren't cheap or even close to being as cheap and do business with American business's and American customers. Yes, we've seen the liberals flex their muscles and we seen their groups flex theirs too be neither compare to what 60 million us could do to them. I mean, who are we?
1. Comparative advantage applies. Economics 101: a good trial lawyer might also be a good janitor, but you are not going to use a good trial lawyer to vacuum the floors of a law office. The fellow who gets a job as a janitor at that law firm can almost certainly do little else and is lucky to get that job. $150K a year is far too much to pay for a janitor, but it might be reasonable for a trial attorney. $15K a year might be what a janitor gets, and he might be lucky just to get a job that pays that much.
China has plenty of farm laborers for whom manufacturing work in an industrial sweatshop is a huge improvement even if the pay is abysmal and the conditions are poor. Industrial growth in any country usually reflects the time in which agricultural laborers become factory workers. Maybe American workers need to develop new skills for an advanced economy -- lest America revive the industrial sweatshop jobs that few Americans would now take, the ones that pay near-starvation wages for 65-hour workweeks.
Free trade is normally the consumer's friend. It promotes technological innovation and cuts the cost of living. It is far more effective than relying upon trade deals to create exceptions for political reasons.
2. HVAC installation and repair is skilled work. Skilled work ordinarily pays well because few people can do the specific task. You could not find people to work for you from overseas. Many could not speak or write English, so no matter how skilled they are they could not follow your instructions. That would make them useless. Skilled labor is not particularly mobile. Semi-skilled workers have proved mobile in the past, as shown in America getting a huge number of textile workers from the Russian Empire who made possible the garment industry.
3. We are finding ways to avoid the damaging effects of Donald Trump, thank you. We are teaching our daughters and grand-daughters how to avoid people as vile as he (see also Harvey "Swine-stein", who was once a big supporter of liberal causes). It's going to take significant time before his economic policies cause a serious downturn. Maybe he is wise enough to recognize the folly of supporting a speculative boom as did Coolidge or Dubya -- or perhaps lucky that nothing of the sort is now possible. Some of us on the Blue side are highly creative, which means that we can defeat the Trump agenda with clever words and images.
Your side is the one to get burned.
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.