The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(03-11-2021, 11:06 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(03-11-2021, 10:51 AM)Einzige Wrote:

(03-11-2021, 10:45 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(03-10-2021, 05:42 PM)Einzige Wrote:

(03-10-2021, 04:56 PM)David Horn Wrote: The simplest solution: raise corporate taxes, then require they be paid in stock. Place the stock in a Sovereign Wealth Fund managed by an independent entity (the Fed is a good example of such an entity), which would funnel profits and dividends into the a public distribution channel.  Over time, the Fund will own it all, and you have a synthetic version of your Marxist dream.

Marxism is not mere "worker ownership of the means of production", though it has been vulgarized as such. It calls for nothing less than the abolition of commodity production for exchange and the elimination of exchange value. This does not solve that issue.

Making the perfect the enemy of the good merely guarantees neither will happen.

What you prescribe isn't even good. It's just State capitalism. You're literally just describing something Engels talked about.

If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock companies, trusts, and State property, show how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. At first, the capitalistic mode of production forces out the workers. Now, it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus-population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.

But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.

You made my point.  Better is still better.  Your option has no chance in hell, though it may be a transition from my plan (though I personally doubt it).

Humanity took a long time breaking habits from the Agrarian Age of aristocrats and peasants, and it will take a long time breaking habits from the Industrial era in some transition to Marx's objective (and end state) of Communism in which scarcity no longer exists, social inequality has lost its relevance and its potential sting, and people get to be themselves instead of stereotypes that capitalism impose.  

As Lincoln excoriated slavery for exacting toil out of people through the lash, some later statesman may convince us that exacting toil out of people under abject fear that never quite goes away is as objection in that time as slavery was to Lincoln. 

I see Humanity still under a compulsion to toil because all of human history from the time of the first desperate efforts of agriculture makes such a part of human character, and elites exploit this aspect of human character by reminding people of the precariousness of food, water, shelter, self-esteem, and protection from unpleasant-to-dangerous weather. 

I imagine a world in which people do things mostly for their own sake because they are good or feel good instead of because someone has a harsh command-and-control system that requires fear and suffering to get people to do odious things. I imagine a world in which the status symbols of recent times become irrelevant because they have lost their meaning. I imagine poverty getting recognition as tragedy instead of as a harsh motivator.

He who demands pointless suffering is evil. To be sure, some high achievements will be difficult to attain and will require much self-development. Think of excellence on the violin. That takes about a year and a half of preparation in hours... hours that one might find more tempting things to do than to master the scales and other pedantic exercises so that when one is the soloist in Mendelssohn's Concerto in E one does not give a Jack Benny*-like result. It's easier to lie down on the beach and "catch rays", to tool around in a car that one has modified into a hot rod, to watch banal TV.... getting away with playing three hours of pedantic exercises is a question of whether one has a family that lets one get away with that. If one's family has a marginal dairy farm deep in a rural area, one might be stuck feeding or milking cows, and there might not be a good violin teacher available. 

Note well: we need far more people to milk cows, do oil changes, or change bedpans than concert violinists.  

* OK, OK, OK... Jack Benny simply played a violin out of tune for laughs. He probably could play the violin well enough if he played it straight, although he was not the Fritz Kreisler, Zino Francescatti,  Jascha Heifetz, David Oistrakh, or Nathan Milstein of his time.