04-29-2020, 04:29 PM
We have people working more hours than is necessary for their sustenance -- and in places where property rents are exorbitant, like California and New York City, many people are getting bare sustenance on what they earn short of the necessities for having a place to sleep at night, having presentable clothes for their jobs, and commuting between work and their dismal flat -- especially if they are also paying off student loans.
A big chunk of America's GDP is economic rent -- income that economic elites treat as an entitlement. If that disappeared, most people would see no harm in their lives. Plutocratic ideology has overtaken the benefits of technological improvement. I can understand why "Make America Great Again" appeals as a slogan; many Americans would be better off if they could return in a time machine to the 1950's. (OK, there are some things not to repeat: the mindless destruction and devouring of natural resources that we now consider unthinkable, the smoking habits of the time, the Blood Alley roads, the male chauvinism, and especially Jim Crow practice in the South. But other than that, the next happy time in America will in many ways resemble the 1950's except that our economy will do better stewardship of natural resources, smoking will more likely decline than increase, we won't be tearing up Interstate highways to shunt people onto Blood Alleys, male chauvinism of the 1950's will be abominable, and Jim Crow will be a prime example of Bad Old Ways to be shunned.
Labor unions will be back, and people who do real work will get real pay again. I expect revitalization of the Heartland of America as a means of deconcentration of the population -- which will revive the Rust Belt (even if with an economic basis very different from that of the 1950's). Life will be more conformist, but part of conformity will be a reduction of the disparity between sybaritic excess and gross deprivation that seems to be the recent (and soon moribund) way.
A big chunk of America's GDP is economic rent -- income that economic elites treat as an entitlement. If that disappeared, most people would see no harm in their lives. Plutocratic ideology has overtaken the benefits of technological improvement. I can understand why "Make America Great Again" appeals as a slogan; many Americans would be better off if they could return in a time machine to the 1950's. (OK, there are some things not to repeat: the mindless destruction and devouring of natural resources that we now consider unthinkable, the smoking habits of the time, the Blood Alley roads, the male chauvinism, and especially Jim Crow practice in the South. But other than that, the next happy time in America will in many ways resemble the 1950's except that our economy will do better stewardship of natural resources, smoking will more likely decline than increase, we won't be tearing up Interstate highways to shunt people onto Blood Alleys, male chauvinism of the 1950's will be abominable, and Jim Crow will be a prime example of Bad Old Ways to be shunned.
Labor unions will be back, and people who do real work will get real pay again. I expect revitalization of the Heartland of America as a means of deconcentration of the population -- which will revive the Rust Belt (even if with an economic basis very different from that of the 1950's). Life will be more conformist, but part of conformity will be a reduction of the disparity between sybaritic excess and gross deprivation that seems to be the recent (and soon moribund) way.
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.