11-06-2020, 09:18 AM
(11-05-2020, 12:20 PM)David Horn Wrote:(11-05-2020, 08:07 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 05-Nov-2020 World View: It's almost over
As of this moment, it appears that the election counting is almost over, and Biden will be president, the Republicans will lose one seat in the Senate but still control it, and the Democrats will lose several seats in the House, but still control it. The stock markets are cheering because this means political gridlock.
There is something uniquely bad about market economics that sees political failure, and gridlock guarantees it, as a huge plus for capitalists. We're less and less on the same team. Nick Hanauer is right. Eventually, the trampled-upon will take revenge, and it won't be restrained.
The contemporary United States really is a plutocracy. The economic elites prefer that we have at least enough democracy to not take up arms against monopolistic gougers, bureaucratic exploiters as nasty as the Soviet nomenklatura, and (if one lives where there is opportunity for high pay for people who can live well no matter where they are) rapacious landlords who impose a private tax upon tenants. America remains a paradise for tycoons (OK, we need that if we are to get innovation of the sorts that we associate with John Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, James Cash Penney, the Skaggs brothers, Ray Kroc, Sam Walton, and Bill Gates. It is better that we have a few hyper-rich who make crazy money than that we be without their innovative businesses. These people did not make their wealth by bleeding the national treasury, which is far better than what some lunatic or fanatic as a central planner of a 'socialist' economy. The great fault with 'socialist' economies was that they could at most be 'me-too' on any technological innovation (except perhaps in weapons technology with MiG's and AK-47's, the latter that the US Armed Forces have bought for the post-Saddam government in Iraq).
In the long view I am tempted to believe that Big Business makes Big Government necessary as an enforcer of the will of those elites, for supplying needs for those capitalists (roads for the auto and petroleum industry), and for mitigating the effects of capitalism in displacing people in its allegedly-necessary "creative destruction". A mad system can promote economic growth with great human suffering; a sane system insists upon mitigating human suffering. That is the difference between democracy and dictatorship should the dictator have no moral compass other than strengthening the economy that he needs. As William F. Buckley put it, he would rather trust a random selection of people out of the phone book than a clique of Harvard professors with the public welfare. Democracy is ideally responsible to the moral values of the people, however faulty those values may be.
Democracy is no better than the People, but what else are you to trust? Maybe we have been paying too much attention to video games instead of connecting to people in nursing homes (don't blame COVID-19; that was so before the plague) or the liberal arts that ideally make people wise enough to make complex decisions of moral import. Note well that however flawed it is, the School of Hard Knocks welcomes all who get little, inadequate, or flawed education. That is part of how the generational cycle works: the sort of corrupt speculative boom of the 1920's proceeded because the Gilded who knew better were no longer around to thwart it, and Americans who learned the hardest job lesson possible in the Great Depression that speculative bubbles always implode catastrophically were able to thwart a replay until the last of them had lost their influence due to death or extreme old age. Then came the real estate boom of the Double-Zero Decade and the inevitable panic. At least we had deposit insurance and Barack Obama understood history, some of which he learned from GI grandparents. It is a good idea to learn from ancestors.
America has recently been rifted between people who see plutocrats as the exploiters and intellectuals as a humiliating presence -- even if the "intellectual" is 'only' a K-12 teacher who cringes when hearing bad grammar, f-bombs without obvious justification (OK, I shouted one on the phone as I got a message from a synthesized voice telling me that it was from "Windows" and told me that I had a computer virus), and blatant superstition and pseudoscience. We will need to be more competent at technology, but we will also need to have more humanistic values. If I must choose between the advanced technology and the humanistic values in a conflict between those, then I'll go with the humanistic values. I have seen household settings of the Victorian era, and as long as one was not poor, life seemed comfortable enough. This said, the marked difference between America before the Second World War and after the Second World War was between the certainty of poverty for the vast majority of Americans no matter what they did and the much-more widespread opportunity for Americans after the Second World War.
OK... the second-biggest story for most Americans in 2020, after the Plague of the Donald Trump Presidency, is the political decision that we Americans have been making. Joe Biden has taken leads in Georgia as the lawful votes are running out, and that is the best time in which to have a lead in an election -- no matter how small the lead. 537 votes were enough votes in one state to decide Florida in 2000, and the number could be even smaller in Georgia. He has also taken a lead in the popular vote in Pennsylvania as the votes rapidly dwindle. 98% of the vote is in in Pennsylvania, and 99% is in in Georgia. The only question may be of some military votes that must be accepted late with the appropriate franks (mail from soldiers is free to the soldier). I'm guessing that many of our Armed Services heroes who have been standing up for American interests contrary to the folly of the current President have sent their ballots in in ample time, and that even in Georgia and Pennsylvania, the bulk of those are counted.
There apparently are no more votes coming in, so what you see at the end looks like what you will get.
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.
