02-22-2021, 03:31 PM
(02-20-2021, 11:14 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:(02-20-2021, 09:52 AM)David Horn Wrote:(02-20-2021, 04:21 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(02-20-2021, 02:07 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(02-20-2021, 12:48 AM)Einzige Wrote: What century plus old system?
The Bolshevik Revolution took place nearly 105 years ago. Stalin's worst horrors happened about 90 years ago.
The Communist Manifesto was written in 1848.
It's noteworthy that economic dogmas have a short shelf life. What we call "the economy" has changed so much in the last 200 years that its hard to see much of the past being relevant today. Keynes was uniquely foresighted by being uniquely open about the economic model. He focused on the human factors. Marx, on the other hand, was totally immersed in his model, which is so out of date today it's hard to take it seriously anymore.
But Keynes wasn’t right on everything either. Nearly a century ago he predicted that by this time most of us would be working 20 hours per week or less. Later futurists made similar predictions. And yet it seems that so many of us perhaps the majority are working more instead of less and have had to forgo gatherings with friends along with hobbies. One of the big lies of our times IMO. Wonder if we’ll ever see this more leisured society ever happen.
The solution for the most rapacious plutocrats was to make sure that everything got costlier, if no less efficient. Consider the cost of residential property: at one time the canon among mortgage lenders was that families should borrow no more on housing than 35% of their income as costs of principal, interest, taxes, and insurance. Renters supposedly paid less... but that is over. In some places, landlords can exact as much as 70% of disposable income from people. For-profit medicine may not be better at anything other than bleeding the assets of the middle class. Marx had the doctrine of the declining rate of profit, which a non-Marxist could reduce to the assumption that as capitalism matured and became more efficient, that capitalists would make on volume what they once made on high markups in new products.
Capitalists can get the easy money that they once did... and easy money for passive investors who need not innovate is potential exploitation. Easy money also creates some political perversity as easy money means plenty of lucre for expenditure on one of the most profitable actions possible: purchase of the political process.
(Oh, the alliteration!)
Henry George had his solution: tax the Hell out of easy money. Thus one (1) guts the inequality, and (2) gets the funds for a welfare state.
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.