04-10-2019, 04:09 PM
(04-10-2019, 03:23 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Is there a time in American life in which life is so odious as it is now? Even in the Gilded Age, technological progress led to real improvements in people's lives. Today most of us are obliged to suffer with a smile and support reactionary politicians who give rights to the rich and responsibilities to the poor.
We may need an economic meltdown on the scale of 1929-1932 to weaken the power of our current elites. We need an economy in which one must do good to do well; anything else is a nightmare. We need to be more self-reliant so that we not become debt-bonded serfs. We need to be able again to improve ourselves with sweat equity. It was the economic meltdown of 1929-1932 that fostered the building of small business instead of companies best described as bloated, monopolistic, bureaucratized behemoths.
I think there’s two differences between the gilded age and today. One good and one bad. The good is that we have something resembling a social safety net today that was virtually non-existent in the gilded age. Medicaid, Obamacare, Medicare, labor laws on children and minimum wages, foodstamps, section 8 housing, public school grants, disability and worker’s compensation, unemployment insurance, etc. However unlike the technological advances of the gilded age which improved life, our technological advances have done very little to do that. And most importantly: the current social safety net hasn’t improved much and is only there to mitigate the most severe of damages.
I think this ties into what the really bad difference is today: the lack of hope from people. Noam Chomsky remembers the 1930’s well and he noted going into the 2012 election that people today just don’t have hope like they use to in his time. He even believed that the crazed right wing would takeover the levies of power in the next election cycle (He was off by 4 years: 2012 vs 2016). Source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.indepen...html%3famp
