09-28-2017, 06:31 PM
(09-28-2017, 05:27 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(09-28-2017, 10:26 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Good hard-workin' folks like Classic Xer, who support this system accurately described as one "that treats the poor as objects of exploitation and abuse," call those who can not find work or can't work "lazy" and "idiots," but there are a fair number of such "lazy, idiotic" people, especially in a system that does not provide enough jobs (due to automation, free trade, and bosses that don't care and will fire people for little or no reason). Liberals don't look upon welfare recipients as either victims or cheaters; most are neither. Welfare is just a small item in the federal budget, and of varying sizes in state budgets, that provides a little bit of protection of the kind all of us might need. Many of us aren't even eligible for welfare in that case anyway. Time limits on welfare are abusive punishment, since depressions and recessions are frequent, job losses continual, and various kinds of suffering and disability can happen at any time on more than one occasion to any one of us. Finding a good job has never been easy, and calling people who can't find work "idiots" just blames the people for the troubles which the selfish bosses alone give us.
...People like Classic X'er and Warren Dew may not recognize how precarious one's qualification as a 'hard-working person' is. We are all but one accident away from no longer being able to work hard. We are also mostly one paycheck to ten away from being destitute. Whether we keep our jobs or not may depend upon an employer having a government contract -- or the choice of some tycoon on which plant gets shut down or which product line is terminated.
Most of us are at much more risk from the arbitrary decisions of our masters than we are from any tendency to go lazy. Work ethic? Like skill, it must be cultivated. A good system rewards it; a bad system exacts toil with the threat of brutality, as on a plantation, a KZ-Lager, or a Gulag.
Quote:Welfare is the main scapegoat that impels people like Classic Xer (which includes perhaps 40% of America or more; he's not alone at all) to vote Republican and support the trickle-down theory, which says give breaks to the bosses instead of the people, and then the "job creator" bosses will provide jobs for us. Not only does trickle-down NOT trickle, but the reason that 40% of the good people like Classic Xer and Warren Dew support trickle-down economics, is because they blame welfare recipients and liberal politicians for their high taxes. But blaming welfare has nothing to do with their high taxes, which are not that high to begin with. The government wastes money on wars, weapons, and subsidies to the rich corporations, and by not taxing the wealthy enough-- due to the trickle-down theory.
I remember a business guru telling people that the net growth of employment at Fortune-500 companies over fifty years (this was about 1990) was negative. Most of those companies have been profitable. If companies can find more profitable solutions to productivity than labor, then those companies will whittle away at their workforce. Maybe people have to create their own jobs with startup businesses or resort to such employment as domestic help...
Quote:There may be some welfare cheaters, but we are all victims in a sense; victims of the decision of the people to vote Republican. So a lot of us are responsible for the troubles we all experience living in this system. And that's not even to mention a campaign finance system instituted by Republican Supreme Court justices that favors the rich, gerrymandering that favors Republican legislators since 2010, and voter suppression now underway in many Republican-controlled states. Oh, and I almost forgot: an election system called the electoral college set up to protect slavery, and still doing that job by, among other things, putting into office without majority voter approval the only Republican presidents of the 21st century.
Our economic system works very well for (1) financiers and tycoons, (2) business executives, (3) big landowners, (3) well-connected professionals such as corporate attorneys, lobbyists, and investment bankers, and (4) organized crime. With his connections to organized crime, Donald Trump exemplifies American capitalism at its worst.
In the area in which I live, there are huge numbers of Old Order Amish. Few of us would like to live as they do... leaving school at age sixteen is the worst of it, something that makes their rejection of electronic entertainments a minor inconvenience by contrast. This is not praise of a simple life -- no 'behold the lilies of the field, for they toil not'. Theirs are lives of toil. But at least they have some security as small farmers, and they seem to have no parasitical elite of bureaucracy among them. Of course that means that they have no white-collar work except perhaps for the preacher or the teacher...
Is that what it takes?
Quote:"Unemployment, alimony, child support, and pensions are not welfare. Neither is disability." And neither are social security and medicare, which recipients have paid for and which protect us all, not just a few cheaters. And there's medicaid and Obamacare subsidies; arguably that's welfare, but not welfare per se. And not if healthcare is in fact a right, as liberals proclaim. A right implied in the Declaration of Independence, which announces our right to life.
The Hard Right has practically devolved to the idea that we all owe all to the economic elites from whom all blessings flow -- of course, at the will of those elites, who know that if the flow is 'too strong', then people might not fear those elites enough. Having worked at jobs in which suffering was a certainty but smiling was a necessity, I see such as a fraud.
Quote:The veneration of work and the condemnation of those who don't work by conservatives may be obsolete, in an economy that does not provide work, and which could very well save labor for all of us by turning it over to machines, if the bosses were stripped of their current exclusively-given rights to their benefits. We are going to need to be less dogmatic about the economic system into which we are moving, and adapt to the new situation.
If capitalism can produce far more than all human needs, then it must also offer the means of buying the fruit of the production. before people get complacent about the potential for capitalist tyranny, then consider how things go in Nineteen Eighty-Four: although productivity is high, far outstripping all human need, the workers keep finding their lives increasingly debased. Sure, the system calls itself "socialist", but the "socialism" is with no humanistic values, and in view of the linguistic fraud that is the basis of communication, one can doubt whether the system is socialist. It looks like an every-man-for-himself order. Or maybe it is 'socialism' only for the Party bureaucracy, with everyone else being obliged to take entrepreneurial risks for slave-like compensation and treatment. Let us hope that when someone speaks of free enterprise it is of competitive markets and personal choice instead of enterprises free to do to people all sorts of evil at the behest of owners and managers.
Quote:And another wrinkle in the conservative myth is veneration of the rich, as people who worked to get ahead and thus deserve their rewards, as opposed to most of us who may aspire to be rich, in the good old American dream, but are not. But the rich do not earn their rewards; that is the myth. The Reaganoid political and economic system we live under provides rewards for them, by allowing them to pay most workers a pittance while they rack up 300 times what their workers get through high salaries and financial games that ruin the economy for everyone but themselves, while meanwhile the workers are no longer protected by adequate minimum wages, low tariffs or declining unions and are often deprived of the education they needed in the first place.
The easiest way to get rich is to be born into a rich family. The second easiest is to marry into money. The third easiest is to do crime. The fourth is to invest or innovate.
Where Item #2 is concerned, the marrying into money no longer comes from huge lavish debutante balls, which in many ways were the forerunners of some of today's dating services, many of which are priced out of reach of "average" singles. Many felt that such snobbery was no longer needed once "nice" girls ended up going off to college, getting good jobs, etc.