Election 2020

[pbrower2a]

(01-06-2020, 02:53 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(01-05-2020, 03:10 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Republicans lost the House because Trump was a lousy President. The 2018 midterm election was not a landslide; Republicans made gains in the Senate on net because of Democrats holding Senate seats that they won in 2012 against complete fools or have held onto in states drifting R and finally lost. Even so, Democrats won the majority of the total vote for US Senators. A vote for Trump is basically a vote for a reversion to the Gilded Age, a time in which nothing mattered except the gain, indulgence, and power of economic elites for which people got promises of pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die.

All politicians promise what they can get away with promising; Republicans have gotten more aggressive and reckless with such in recent years. Just think of global warming. It would be more convenient to not shovel so much snow, to not use so much heating fuel, and to be able to go on Sunday drives on more winter days with knowledge that the temperature will get closer to 55F than to -5F. I don't particularly like Michigan winters, but for that I might soon spell relief F-L-O-R-I-D-A, as many do where I live. I know what harsh, snowy winters do: they protect upper-level ground water, and the last April thaw supplies copious water to germinating plants. I have never been in Winter Wheat country, but the trick is that the crops get their start in the late summer and are partially grown before they grow for harvest after winter is over. They too need winter snows to protect the soil moisture during the dormancy of the plants.  Agriculture remains the cornerstone of all healthy economies except for such places as Saudi Arabia that extract fuels or minerals cheaply for a small population.There is no technological or medical fix for hunger. When people get hungry, the economic and political order collapses. Maybe we can adjust to slow and (probably) inevitable global warming, but abrupt warming will be an unmitigated disaster for perhaps hundreds of millions of people.

I follow the numbers, and I see a reality very different from yours. I also recognize that the Millennial Generation has often endured severe hardships in part because of vindictive, right-wing politicians who saw poverty as the key to creating prosperity by compelling people to work longer and harder for less. Oh, if only people would suffer more for the Master Class who owes them nothing -- and remembers to smile even more! As a liberal Boomer I could predict the consequences; the Millennial Generation has often felt the consequences. 

Socialism? The Marxist-Leninist variety that seizes the property and runs it? Marx ignored that bureaucratic elites could exploit the common man just as severely as could capitalists, feudal lords, and even slave-owning planters. Government ownership and operation of businesses has rarely proved effective and has shown itself to be chary of innovation -- just like private monopolies. The only rationale for government ownership of business is of natural monopolies or of entities that cannot be run on a profit-and-loss basis. I would be satisfied with "capitalism with a human face" at this point. 

You may have some scruples, and you may stand for a community that does far more for people in distress than the distant shareholders and dismissive executives.

No. I can't blame him for a failure by the Republican party at the time. The Republican party lost the House because it didn't have a short term plan in place  to fix our issues with Obamacare.  So, who are the liberal professors and teachers who should have stopped preaching the value of socialism and stop speaking as if it's the greatest system on earth the day after the Soviet Union collapsed and disappeared from the earth. Oh that's right, we've still got the Peoples Republic of China and some other third world countries still hanging around lending them hope these days. So, whose job should it be to shut them up and get rid of them or replace them with temporary educators/socialist recruiters from one of them countries? I really don't think it should be us. I think it should be the job of Democrats since they are now being associated and directly viewed as being their problem these days. Where are all your center rights these days? Do our liberal institutions even have center rights around these days or has the Left succeeded in getting rid of them? I've noticed they've been coming down pretty hard on what's left of their police forces. I don't think that's good but that's blue America so who gives a fuck.

The GOP idea is to price people into the grave if they are no longer valuable to their bosses or lack assets, or to make medical debt inheritable even after the assets that the deceased had are gone. The added profit is to be achieved through an insurance system that operates on a cost-plus basis. 

Practically nobody in the United States believes in the Marxist-Leninist model of socialism in which the government owns the assets and then determines what workers get through central planning. If you are thinking of China -- the People's Republic of China is arguably as pure in capitalist practice as it could be. Sure, it still has images of the radical Mao Zedong everywhere and still has Commie symbols, but the system has gutted Marxism in practice. It is a good thing that the insane socialism of Mao is gone in China. Regrettably the dictatorship remains. 

Gutting a wacky socialist like Mao and keeping his image is one thing. I am more scared of Americans who gut the political principles upon which America is founded and needful principles that have arisen since then. I am troubled with a Party that claims to be the Party of Lincoln yet guts his principles in favor of a President who has shown a desire to act as a despot. What is worse -- gutting Mao's lunatic ideas on economics or gutting Lincoln's "new Birth of Freedom"? 

...So where are the center-right people? Donald Trump has made them politically homeless. What passed as the Center-Right in the South was never strong, Southern politics eventually splitting between (largely) blacks who are quite liberal on economics and ethnic equity and agrarian racists who were never comfortable with such.  The center-right in the North believed in limiting government activity, but also in competitive economics in business to keep Big Business honest.

Here is one explanation: everyone is for Big Government if such serves his purposes. Some on the Left believe that it takes Big Government to ameliorate the plight of the poor and that such is an ethical imperative. I can imagine a big issue of the upcoming 1T as the smoothing of regional divides of wealth and poverty. There will be practical reasons, including the harsh divide between people having to pay a high price for living where the opportunities are (let us say Silicon Valley) and a different price for living where the opportunities are gone (let us say, St. Louis). Big Government is necessary for a garrison state that delivers great profits to military contractors. It also serves those who see the government as Uncle Sucker, subsidizing its bloated projects in which the taxpayers absorb the risk of default but the investors get monopoly profits with the aid of a government that enforces the will of the monopolist. Under such a system, people are either victims, exploiters, enforcers, or rebels. Trump stands for that, as do (so it seems) the bureaucratic elites that have become a quasi-aristocracy that systematically prevents entry by capable people and competition by anyone else. 

Victims, exploiters, enforcers, and rebels... that sounds familiar -- as in Russia at the outbreak of WWI.