(10-06-2022, 12:22 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: I came in expecting to respond with some form of "oh c'mon! surely we can't blame y'all for everything!", but as it pertains to most of the specific points....yeah, that is mostly the boomer's fault. The boomer elite want the privileges of a bureaucracy that favors them, but not the costs. They want the perks of free market capitalism, but only insofar that they can pork barrel the budget and get into irresponsible levels of debt without any accountability.
Other than point 6, which I don't blame them as much for, points 1-5 are solidly the fault of various boomers.
It's the Boomer elites, people who decided to ensure that they alone get the opportunity for the Good Life. All that has kept America from going into the sort of decline that one associates with the Soviet Union in its last twenty years is the survival of formal democracy (which bad Boomers did their best to destroy) and competitive enterprise (likewise).
1. Boomers in the cultural elite had a flawed vision in which if the right people got the power (economic, bureaucratic, and political) they would solve everything. The ones who got those intermeshed instead of being separate and in the needful conflict for liberal democracy became a closed, interlocking elite. They made dissent irrelevant due to its futility. There is not and never will be a perfect order, and even what one generation sees as wonderful has severe flaws for those who had no part in making it but are obliged to make it work while obeying its dictates. Just think of the Cavalier kids of Puritans establishing their paradise. Righteousness falls afoul of the sex drive, hedonism, and pecuniary necessity that never quite go away.
Democracy requires some minimal contest and conflict to allow genuine progress. Shutting out millions from the debate is one way to kill democracy. If Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses, we now have pop culture. The Idiot Screen is easy to outgrow, as is pop culture.
American democracy depended upon a civilized debate between Big Business, small farmers, and industrial workers through their elected representatives. Big Business became the norm in agriculture as agribusiness squeezed out the yeoman farmer. Neoliberal economics is the obliteration of whatever political power workers ever had.
As Donald Trump, an exponent of the worst in the Boom Generation and none of the potential virtues, exemplifies, things can deteriorate to the point that politics degrades into a nasty struggle to preserve what one has.
2. Licensing has some validity in keeping gross incompetents and outright crooks out of a profession in which those with knowledge and connections can abuse and fleece others. No profession is beyond judgment -- even law and medicine. We certainly don't want short-tempered people as schoolteachers, and we don't want crooks dealing in insurance or real estate.
3. American industry and commerce used to work adequately without academic credentials. Of course I can understand why just about anyone offering even the most menial, mindless job wants no high-school drop-outs; such people are not so much stupid as rebellious and pointlessly stubborn. Someone barely scraping by in high-school has shown the ability to deal with some benign bureaucracy, follow rules, and defer gratification. Perhaps really-well-educated people are marginally better even at menial and servile jobs; the barista with a BA in history might be better at using conversation to get a customer to stick around longer than someone who simply brings out the drink or sandwich and walks away after a perfunctory "thank you".
This said, the acceleration of credentialing is excellent at creating large numbers of people of high competence at jobs that do not require such competence. A huge investment that ends up with a marginal improvement is a waste; so it goes with those who get the "wrong" college degree.
4. The neglect of job creation has itself put people under severe economic distress, and that can push people into petty crime. The penal system creates huge profits for construction contractors and those who supply the monitoring equipment. We are going to see the effect of the emancipation of people convicted for offenses involving marijuana -- millions of second chances.
5. We have used public debt to create some awful infrastructure and subsidize some horrid land use. The quarter-acre lot minimum in some places ensures plenty of open space that few people get to use -- and ensures that the costs of utilities increases to subsidize people who require more infrastructure in telecommunications, water supply, and power distribution. We have excessively relied upon the automobile for transportation, and such shows in some dreadful "stroads", highways that bring rural speeds into commercial and residential areas that make pedestrian and bicycle traffic dangerous.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018...-it-matter
Such roads (hybrids of streets and roads) are commonplace in cities and medium-sized towns alike. They accommodate strip malls, motels, convenience store-gas stations, box stores, and fast-food places, and connect with expressways. Apartments may be nearby, but those are veritable prisons to those unwilling or unable to start a car to go somewhere within walking distance. Dwellers in those apartments not surprisingly stay put and get unhealthy due to inactivity and bad diet (heavily low-quality convenience foods from box stores) and mentally vegetate in front of the Idiot Screen.
Inadequate pay, a consequence of public policy in the name of neoliberal economics, practically compels people to go heavily in debt for the gamble of college education and for consumer purchases. Obviously most people hate their work and salve the feelings of inadequacy for holding jobs too small for their spirits with debt-fueled consumerism. One symptom is the appearance of rent-to-own rip-off emporiums that sell shoddy merchandise on 'easy payment' plans that prove excessive in cost for what people get.
Part of this Crisis is people trying to undo the wreckage that neoliberalism has done to their lives. We have millions who have already retired who have spent their entire working lives under neoliberal rules (we will work you to the bone, but we will pay you with credit instead of cash).
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.
