11-02-2019, 05:20 PM
(11-02-2019, 04:24 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: I'm definitely better off than I was in 1979. Than 1999, definitely not.
Well-educated people who had crappy jobs back in 1979 are usually better off now than they were in 1979. They generally got to prove that they were capable of something 'better' than retail sales, food service, cleaning, or low-level clerical work in offices. Eventually opportunities arose as well-paid older workers retired. Or maybe one wen back to college and got an MBA degree or went to law school. People who worked in department stores because they were not going to be factory workers or secretaries became what they said that they dreaded after finding that the biggest nightmare in American life aside from prison is poverty. Or maybe they started small businesses for a limited clientele and got a modest income.
Quote:The free market works fine as long it's actually a competitive free market; that's what liberalism really is. When the big guys grew to multinational oligopolies, and they started making their money from globalist exploitation instead of competing for customers, that's when the problems happened. That's when liberalism turned into neoliberalism.
We have often sacrificed freedom that allows people to participate in a competitive economy for freedom for the market to do things to people in the assumption that more freedom for the elites will by itself create more prosperity for us all. What has happened is that the economic elites have instead grabbed more by squeezing tighter on the outflow through wages to people other than themselves. Is it freedom for 'the Market' or is it freedom for people? The first is nearly an Orwellian concept. The second is what we used to have.
The freedom to do horrible things to people is a sham.
Quote:
Contra Eric, it's all the leftist billionaires at tech giants like Google and Facebook that are driving neoliberalism now. The Mercers aren't even globalist, though the Kochs are.
Are those billionaires so much leftists as the last plutocrats who have some semblance of being one of Toynbee's creative elites that does not demand control of every aspect of the lives of the common man?
Donald Trump saw much distress in 2016 and exploited it. He has solved nothing, but he has tried to entrench the power of the Master Class.
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.