01-15-2020, 06:03 AM
(01-15-2020, 02:44 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(01-14-2020, 11:51 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: If we got rid of California and some blue cities, where would we rank? Food for thought. Think about, how much money to we spend to provide costly services for your potential voter's and your illegals or your potential future voters and the refuges (more potential future voters) that your liberal policies associated with global agreements for us to take in and support. Like I said, you guys (the liberals) have a pretty good gig going on for themselves.
Part of the above is supporting tasks which must be done rather than leaving the jobs undone and pocketing the money. This would include attacking environmental issues and fixing infrastructure. The conservatives tend to live in areas which suffer less effects, and thus would rather pocket the money. Liberals consider this short sighted. OK, boomer?
Notice that much of the new prosperity that we have comes from the creation of intellectual property (which may not be particularly intellectual, as with much television and many movies, or with supermarket tabloids and pulp novels)... but surely, Classic X'er is imbibing in the wares of Disney, Warner Brothers, Universal, CBS/Viacom,etc. We are at the age at which scarcity exists solely as a consequence of personal laziness or improvidence... or as means of control by elites who can enforce their will over the common man. Even the new poor may have much left from comparatively good times.
In about half the world, it is questionable that people can be made happier by having more stuff, let alone that people can make huge profits by making more stuff to sell. One can call this the end of economic growth if one wishes -- but we are there. It used to be possible to make a solid income as a factory worker because as such one was making things that could improve lives. Manufacturing in America has largely been reduced to replacement or for items for one-time use (such as food). Profits are more likely to arise from cornering a market than from innovation or service. What investors like and what is good for Humanity are disparate entities.
Quote:This is one time where the racism draws close to the surface. The international agreements are there to help everybody. Some conservatives would rather focus on people most like themselves. Those supporting privilege and benefit for people most like themselves in skin pigmentation and religion are definitely frowned upon by liberals.
I would not inflict poverty on anyone else except as a consequence of gross misconduct -- like betting big on other people's money and losing while pocketing huge salaries. I don't feel sorry for people who lost out at Lehman Brothers, where a predatory ethos developed. Capitalism at its best rewards people for doing good even if a market demonstrates that one is producing a glut or garbage. (That is where the Soviet Union failed -- what it was producing was largely unmarketable unless it was an old luxury like caviar or diamonds or such raw materials as metals.
This said, it is minority communities that often have the greater innovation in commercial enterprise, particularly because Big Business just does not know how to meet the demands of customers that bureaucratic elites simply do not understand. The minority communities may be less ravaged than poor whites who long relied upon Big Business as employers and vendors. Now that many have lost their employment (especially and most infamously in coal mining) they have no clue. Maybe if we were not so obliged to rely upon vertically-integrated oligopolies for work and supplies we would have fewer problems.
Quote:Are all people created equal? Must we work to preserve and build infrastructure, to continue stability? If we are to keep the benefits of lands where many live close together - pick up trucks, TV sets, other appliances built in more urban areas such as California and the other blue areas - we have to address the problems which result from folks that live close together. The more rural dwellers seem to want a free ride and get bent out of shape when they don’t get it. At the same time, in rural areas it is far more practical to adopt a more independent lifestyle, and they should not be forced to pay for things they do not want or need.
If one is a wheat farmer in central Illinois, one may need the port facilities of Chicago to make one's wheat available to the rest of the world -- and hence marketable. One may also have school teachers from the University of Illinois to keep the kids from descending into the barbarism and barbarity that one often associates with inadequate education. Besides, to avoid numbing boredom one attends movies made in Greater Los Angeles or cartoon features made in the San Francisco Bay Area, electronic devices designed in Silicon Valley, or books and magazines edited in New York City. Every one of those places (including Champaign-Urbana, home of the University of Illinois) is flagrantly "blue".
Quote:There are real solid reasons for the rural urban divide. Even the bias towards white male protestants is understandable, if reprehensible.
People live differently in rural and urban America; Suburbia has become legitimately urban in its characteristics, which explains why what used to be the most reliably Republican part of America is going Democratic. Democrats better address urban problems because they have less fear of the intellect necessary for alleviating something so troublesome as traffic jams. Note well; Trump is the most clueless President that we have had in a long time -- long enough that in such times the federal government was a triviality in the lives of most people.
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.