United States Politics Thread 46

[Raphael]

There's a whole book on division in the 1990s:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/ ... 7359115298

[Nortaneous]

I've already expressed we aren't playing the "But what about this not-presently-relevant thing, though? Talk about this so I can control the narrative and never actually address any valid criticisms!" game today. You're welcome to pursue whatever problems with Pfizer all you like, but it won't change that Trump politicised it.

You've been using that phrase a lot. Do you know what it means? For that matter, what does it mean for something to be "politicized"?

That's an interesting list, but I think you're overestimating the daylight between Trump and Ted Cruz-- at least after December 2016. Social conservatism gets the punters to the polls and sells an awful lot of merch.

Roe v. Wade hasn't been overturned and Charlie Brown hasn't kicked the football.

Wasn't there a really big gap when George W. Bush was president as well?

Yes, but not like this. It ramped up during the 2010 Tea Party protests, more with Trump taking office, and even more as the whole QAnon bullshit took root. Jan. 6th was the height of it.

Pro wrestling isn't the height of anything - it doesn't even compare to the 1950s. "Lolita Lebrón" is too funny a name to get much play in the history books, but you'd expect some coverage to mention that the country existed between the Civil War and 2008.

The 2010s were probably a reversion to the norm. At least there were fewer bombings.

[bradrn]

I've already expressed we aren't playing the "But what about this not-presently-relevant thing, though? Talk about this so I can control the narrative and never actually address any valid criticisms!" game today. You're welcome to pursue whatever problems with Pfizer all you like, but it won't change that Trump politicised it.

You've been using that phrase a lot. Do you know what it means? For that matter, what does it mean for something to be "politicized"?

I’d say something has become politicised when one’s opinion on it is overwhelmingly determined by one’s political affiliation. At least in the US, it seems that climate change and gun rights are politicised, vaccines are somewhat politicised, and geology hasn’t (yet) been politicised.

Wasn't there a really big gap when George W. Bush was president as well?

Yes, but not like this. It ramped up during the 2010 Tea Party protests, more with Trump taking office, and even more as the whole QAnon bullshit took root. Jan. 6th was the height of it.

Pro wrestling isn't the height of anything - it doesn't even compare to the 1950s. "Lolita Lebrón" is too funny a name to get much play in the history books, but you'd expect some coverage to mention that the country existed between the Civil War and 2008.

The 2010s were probably a reversion to the norm. At least there were fewer bombings.

I read a most fascinating article a while ago about political violence in the 80s. I wish I could find it again.

Semi-relatedly, another interesting article on politicisation and polarisation: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/c ... rtisanship. The conclusion is that the nature of polarisation has steadily changed since the 60s: back then one party was elite and the other was anti-elite, now both parties cater to different elites.

[rotting bones]

In the reality in which we live, it is much easier to bring fifty local businesses into compliance with some new health regulation, where the fines for violating it would be so onerous they would not have any other choice, where a giant corporation might just consider it part of the cost of doing business. If I'm not much mistaken, this is not that uncommon.

It depends on a number of factors. Below a certain threshold, the more distributed an industry is, the less you can regulate it.

I mentioned explicitly the breakup of monopolies, and would certainly include that provisions against large-scale capital accretion ought to be in place

I think breaking up existing monopolies requires a different set of tools than ones required to prevent capital accumulation. If you have a clean way to prevent capital accumulation, then you've basically solved capitalism.

Note the qualifiers "sensible" (not tending to fringe ideas) and "sustainable" (not likely to cause broadly harmful knock-on effects).

I don't think it makes more sense to claim that a theory is "sensible" than for a moralist to insist that a course of action is "good". The whole point is that people don't automatically agree on which theories are sensible. Discuss the structure of first order facts first; then infer second order judgments like "good" and "sensible".

This is a silly theory. This would be both (1) not sensible; and (2) not sustainable.

To wit, this "silliness" is a standard result in analytic philosophy.

And this has what, exactly, to do with public policy?

For example, the traditional conservative ideology was derived from avoiding awkward situations. Horrible things are all fine as long as no one important is overly embarrassed. I believe the 21st century meme version is to judge ideas based on their "cringe" factor.

(In Islam, one of the names of God is Al-Sitteer, the one who hides our sins. It is commonly understood in mainstream Islam that sinfulness is fine in the privacy of your home as long as you don't go public with it. Others are also discouraged from slandering you unless someone else is being hurt.)

I've never heard of such a thing as a "metaphysical resource"; I would appreciate clarirification as to what, exactly, you mean by this?

Even you don't know in advance what counts as "suffering" for you and what doesn't. When interpreted in a "sensible" way, "suffering" is, to a great extent, a subjective interpretation, not a physical reality. This makes it confusing to calculate how to avoid it.*

Survival can imply something too basic for my liking — subsistence agriculture or fishing is survival, but humans are capable of doing so much more than that. Whether or not one think they ought to, they also generally will.

I'm not saying people shouldn't do anything but survive. I just don't think you need to appeal to anything besides survival to justify leftist politics. Protecting the environment, economic justice and legal equality are all essential to the survival of society. You may be a nice person yourself, but everyone disagrees on what is or isn't nice, so using your interpretation of niceness to justify leftism will only muddy the waters. Why go there when survival's appeal is almost universal?

It might also be useful to precise that I tend to conceive of "harm" in this context as something done to somebody, generally against their will except in the case of certain pathologies, as opposed to "grief", "pain", and "sorrow" (which are things that may occur without explicit reason, or which are the result of inevitable things, like the death of somebody to whom one is close), or "depression" (a pathology, typically caused by some problem with neurotransmitters, but connected with the others); one might describe depression as "harmful", and consequently think having the resources to treat it widely available something to be aspired to — I also think this.

I like "harm" better than "suffering". However, I'm afraid it comes with the same baggage in that subjective interpretations of physical reality radically diverge on what does or doesn't constitute "harm".

*Concrete example: It is impossible to find an objective answer to the question: "How much suffering is it worth enduring to build a socialist state?" Even the answer "none" can't be justified objectively.

[Ares Land]

What you are following is utilitarianism. I think as a theory of ethics, utilitarianism is of limited utility, pardon the pun. In addition it's plainly wrong and trivially refuted.

I think breaking up existing monopolies requires a different set of tools than ones required to prevent capital accumulation. If you have a clean way to prevent capital accumulation, then you've basically solved capitalism.

Preventing capital accumulation is a difficult problem, but not that difficult. You need to tax and redistribute some of the surplus. Granted, it's easier said than done, but entirely within the capabilities of a functioning modern state.

I find this extremely frustrating. Right-wingers don't want to do that, but I don't begrudge them that: not wanting to change things is the whole point of being a conservative. Left-wingers don't want to do that, either. As far as I can see, they'd rather complain about capitalism than do anything about it.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I have some, admittedly vague, ideas for preventing the accumulation of capital.

The first would be a legal requirement that one doing labour be the primary beneficiary of the work they perform (i.e. that they must be paid say 80-90% of the value which is added to whatever object they produce at the time of their adding the value; the cost of materials should be covered by the other 10-20%). If one have a small factory (small factories seem to have been useful in the development of the postwar German and Japanese economies) in which the people doing the making are all part-owners anyway, the situation will work very nicely. This can be coupled with an idea that overgrowth and overproduction are not necessary. You have howevermany people producing whatever at the capacity at which it is needed. If there are safety concerns about some material being used (i.e. we eliminate the use of plastics almost entirely), the State can subsidise any transition (or the production of some natural eco-friendly substitute) and help with any problems this may cause along the way.

There can also be caps on income (I believe the French Communist party once proposed something like a 100% income tax on income over a million euros per year; while that struck me as a bit severe at the time, a million euro is a lot of money), heavier taxes on non-work-based income (more-or-less any passive revenue stream that is not based on royalties for one's own work) except things like retirement and pensions and the like.

One of the easiest emergent cures for Capitalism is also UBI, but I think the studies that have been done make the case well for themselves. One of my central issues with capitalism is that labour relations under it are based on existential duress (one does not work, one does not eat or have shelter), and consequently I cannot conceive of them as consensual (consent with gun to the head is not consent); though the argument is often made that nobody puts a literal gun to somebody's head to make them get a job, starvation and homelessness are very potent weapons.

A more radical step might be having most, but not all, heavy industry in public hands, but there being some sort of mechanism for rights of access to it. If you have something you want to produce, you simply sign up for time in the factory — if you need rare or difficult to obtain components, there may be some extra steps, or you may need to provide them yourself (I also favour a sort of Neo Marshall Plan for dealing with foreign countries which have the resources, but with the investment having strings of democracy, public benefit, and so on and so on attached), but either way, there will be a way to make it.

Some development could work similarly, too — you have an idea, so you sign up for a laboratory in which to build it, would probably be provided with at least some of the materials, and so on and so on; once you have useable safe thing, you make it and see if you can't convince people to improve their lives with it. Whatever the results of the experiments (couple this with increasing scientific literacy and the understanding of the use of the scientific method), they should be published broadly. If an improvement to society is made, there should be some sort of pension awarded to all who contributed. I don't particularly approve of patents (which are primarily based on factual information, which exist whether or not people know it does), so I think rewarding people who invent things in other ways is certainly a better approach. People seem naturally curious, and will go on wanting to discover and invent things regardless of whether or not they can patent them.

To stop the accretion of creative properties, simply treat them as inalienable extensions of the people who create them, over which they exercise rights of consent or refusal of consent to the adaptation or other use of, and have joint ownership of collaborations by the collaborators, not by investors or companies, who should only be able to license them for a limited period.

[Ares Land]

I don't believe in socialism, at least the who-owns-the-means-of-production kind. More specifically, I don't think it works or is particularly desirable.
That said... there's a very strong case for income caps.Seven-figure salaries are pretty much robbery, perpetrated by chief executives that just happen to be on the board of each others' companies.
I also support taxes on wealth and capital gains taxes. Drawing income from capital is legitimate; but not to the point of having the whole economy spiral into plutocracy.

You're right in pointing out that labor relations are unequal at heart. UBI would help a lot, but it's never going to be enough (it probably won't pay your mortgage.) Other factors that help are, I think, strong trade unions. Perhaps more importantly, a healthy labour market. If your labor market's a seller market... a lot of problems aren't problem anymore. By nature, unprofitable industry will close down, and companies will fail -- the only thing you can do to fix that is make sure people can find employment elsewhere. Same thing for unscrupulous employers (much less of a problem if the employees can easily go work elsewhere.)

It's worth keeping in mind that coops tend to increase unemployment, so they might be counterproductive in the long run. (When given a choice, owner-employees will favor higher wages over recruiting.)
How about public ownership of companies? On the whole neither good nor bad. Privately owned companies will do much better on most respects most of the times. But the market has a way of screwing things up in the long run, so what are we going to do?

(I see this with housing in the Paris area. A lot of housing is social housing, publically owned or otherwise subsidized. Given the crazy state of real estate prices it's either that or selling the whole city to Russian oligarchs. It's a very imperfect solution, and I'm pretty sure in thirty years they'll all have to be privatized again, but hey, it's an imperfect world. Ideally the whole problem could be solved by acknowledging there's a problem, raising interest rates and building better infrastructure.)

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I don't believe in socialism, at least the who-owns-the-means-of-production kind. More specifically, I don't think it works or is particularly desirable.

This is not entirely in keeping with reality, but I suppose you may think what you like.

...Drawing income from capital is legitimate; but not to the point of having the whole economy spiral into plutocracy.

This needs to have a huge number of asterisks and caveats applied to it. For one, how the capital is acquired is important. If one happen to have some amount of money to invest in a business for which one does no work, the amount the investment can pay off ought to be legally capped at a certain amount (perhaps 150-300% of the initial investment), with the investment being closer to a sort of bond with a definite maturity, not actual ownership in the business. We might also include a note that capital is often built on the backs of others (it's entirely preposterous to support Bezos owning all of Amazon, since he did not do all, or even most of the work of building it, and a large share of its success, as with anything in capitalism, was a function of being in the right place at the right time), and that this process of building and acquiring it is not legitimate.

You're right in pointing out that labor relations are unequal at heart.

Unequal was not my wording — non-consensual was.

UBI would help a lot, but it's never going to be enough (it probably won't pay your mortgage.)

And why not? As mechanisation of manufacturing continues, and more jobs simply cease to exist, there will come a point when there will be more people than there is work for them to do. It's eventually going to have to, so we might as well get to work on it now.

Other factors that help are, I think, strong trade unions. Perhaps more importantly, a healthy labour market. If your labor market's a seller market... a lot of problems aren't problem anymore.

While this is true on some level, large businesses, having a lot of power, have a very easy time of making it into a buyer's market, and a decent UBI would make it instantly and irrevocably into a seller's market. I feel like there's some not seeing the forest for the trees in the idea that it will never work. If I'm not much mistaken, every study about it has shown that it tends to improve things when you remove existential duress from people, who can think, plan, and so on more clearly. It also, if I'm remembering right, increases the rate of people doing socially-beneficial but unpaid things.

There's also some issue with treating people as something for which there's a "market". Capital-centered thinking has gone quite a way too far, and it's time to rein that in.

[qupte]By nature, unprofitable industry will close down, and companies will fail -- the only thing you can do to fix that is make sure people can find employment elsewhere. Same thing for unscrupulous employers (much less of a problem if the employees can easily go work elsewhere.)[/quote]
While this is, again, at least somewhat true (bad businesses have a habit of not dying as fast as they ought to), there's also no reason to rely on the private sector to provide jobs or income (we can also do a jobs guarantee, too, so that, if people need more than the UBI, and the employer isn't paying enough or doing this or that other thing they need to, you can just walk down to an employment office and go get paid to do something socially useful instead).

It's worth keeping in mind that coops tend to increase unemployment, so they might be counterproductive in the long run. (When given a choice, owner-employees will favor higher wages over recruiting.)

This is a problem? Again, we don't need to rely on the private sector to provide work either way.

How about public ownership of companies? On the whole neither good nor bad.

It depends on what the company does. Privately-owned utilities are usually bad.

Privately owned companies will do much better on most respects most of the times.

They tend to overproduce and be inefficient and wasteful, in my experience; at least the large ones.

But the market has a way of screwing things up in the long run, so what are we going to do?

Maybe try something other than capitalism, an economic system that requires intense State intervention every decade or so? Social Democracy seems to have stabilised it somewhat, so it's a good starting point, but even there, we still have social problems. Thinking there's an endpoint rather than some sort of continued objective to keep improving, or any one magic bullet, is rather silly.

(I see this with housing in the Paris area.... It's a very imperfect solution, and I'm pretty sure in thirty years they'll all have to be privatized again, but hey, it's an imperfect world.

They wouldn't "have to be" privatised (in the sense of selling off to some private investor; simply selling them at a reasonable rate to families or individuals to inhabit them as primary residences is fine, but that isn't usually what "privatisation" is understood to mean). In fact, privatisation is not the be-all end-all of economic improvers (again, with utilities, and I understand the UK train system, and most US rail, too, I believe these have caused more problems than they've provided solutions). With the state of the world now, I think the ideas of Reagan, Thatcher, and Rand may be laid aside as discredited by reality (Reaganomics has notably failed to deliver on its broad promises, and low public investment has proved a terrible idea).

[rotting bones]

What you are following is utilitarianism. I think as a theory of ethics, utilitarianism is of limited utility, pardon the pun. In addition it's plainly wrong and trivially refuted.

If you're referring to me, my moral system is a form of consequentialism I picked up from John Rawls that's strongly influenced by deontology. John Rawls is the father of mainstream American liberalism. Not only am I not particularly utilitarian, but the closest thing to utilitarianism in this conversation is the position I'm opposing: reducing suffering.

All I'm saying is: Why should I expect the world to go my way if I made leftist politics conditional on the acceptance of my complete moral system? Shouldn't I isolate factors that appeal to as many people as possible so I can forge a majority?

Preventing capital accumulation is a difficult problem, but not that difficult. You need to tax and redistribute some of the surplus. Granted, it's easier said than done, but entirely within the capabilities of a functioning modern state.

I find this extremely frustrating. Right-wingers don't want to do that, but I don't begrudge them that: not wanting to change things is the whole point of being a conservative. Left-wingers don't want to do that, either. As far as I can see, they'd rather complain about capitalism than do anything about it.

1. Under capitalism, the only way a politician can expect to survive after opposing capitalism is if there are nonstop worker protests. This is what I mean by "not clean". All of American politics is infused by money flows.

2. Opposing capitalism can affect job creation in the private sector, where everything is about profit. Since this is the US thread, it's worth noting that the New Deal created government jobs.

This is why I proposed creating government jobs constitutionally in the Capitalism thread, not just on the whim of one generation or another.

PS. I think the political right is uncivilized. I don't mean this as a generic insult. I mean their positions make them unsuited to life in the city. Nothing more or less than that.

[Ares Land]

This is not entirely in keeping with reality, but I suppose you may think what you like.

That's all right. We're bound to agree to disagree a lot when talking politics
But I'm not sure appealing to reality works here. There's no example of a socialist system actually working. ("socialist" meant again, in the seize-the-means-of-production sense. Milder forms of socialism gave much better results.)

UBI would help a lot, but it's never going to be enough (it probably won't pay your mortgage.)

And why not? As mechanisation of manufacturing continues, and more jobs simply cease to exist, there will come a point when there will be more people than there is work for them to do. It's eventually going to have to, so we might as well get to work on it now.

The sums involved are huge. For a UBI of $1000 a month (which is really low compared to what I understand of cost of living in the US), we're talking about half the federal budget, for instance. Now you need to get that kind of budget past the voters and Congress.
In the long run (a couple generations or so) more may be possible, who knows?

While this is true on some level, large businesses, having a lot of power, have a very easy time of making it into a buyer's market, and a decent UBI would make it instantly and irrevocably into a seller's market. I feel like there's some not seeing the forest for the trees in the idea that it will never work. If I'm not much mistaken, every study about it has shown that it tends to improve things when you remove existential duress from people, who can think, plan, and so on more clearly.

Oh, I definitely agree on that.

There's also some issue with treating people as something for which there's a "market". Capital-centered thinking has gone quite a way too far, and it's time to rein that in.

That's a metaphor, and probably a useful one. There is such a thing as a supply and demand of labor. You can find evidence of them under feudalism or even communism.

[qupte]

It's worth keeping in mind that coops tend to increase unemployment, so they might be counterproductive in the long run. (When given a choice, owner-employees will favor higher wages over recruiting.)

This is a problem? Again, we don't need to rely on the private sector to provide work either way. [/quote]
Of course it's a problem. State budgets aren't unlimited.
Check out the example of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia's economic system ran on co-ops. The unemployment rate in the 80s was the highest in Europe (as high as 20%). A significant part of the workforce ended up as guest workers in West Germany, and that was about the best solution anyone could find.
(On the whole Yugoslavia did a lot better than the Eastern Bloc though. The lesson here is probably that there's no magic bullet, not that co-ops are bad.)

It depends on what the company does. Privately-owned utilities are usually bad.

Yeah. But I think it's still hard to figure out what works and what doesn't. For instance, we have a weird private/public mix thing going on here for telecommunications networks and internet/telephone providers. On paper it doesn't look like it should work but it does. (It's way cheaper and better than in the US, but also a lot cheaper than the old state monopoly.)

Maybe try something other than capitalism, an economic system that requires intense State intervention every decade or so? Social Democracy seems to have stabilised it somewhat, so it's a good starting point, but even there, we still have social problems. Thinking there's an endpoint rather than some sort of continued objective to keep improving, or any one magic bullet, is rather silly.

Precisely, there is no magic bullet at this point. It would be nice to have an ideal system at the ready, but we have no such thing. So the only thing we can do is try and figure out solutions, try and test them on the spot and see what works.

(Nationalizing huge parts of the economy has been tried in France, most recently in 1981. Long story short, the results turned out disappointing.)

1. Under capitalism, the only way a politician can expect to survive after opposing capitalism is if there are nonstop worker protests. This is what I mean by "not clean". All of American politics is infused by money flows.

Survive, in what sense? Did you mean "survive politically", or did you mean that in a more literal, CIA-black-ops sense?

I think right now the problem is with the voters. I'm always amazed at how much American politics have moved left, but democratic socialism still seems to be a minority taste. Bernie Sanders can't oppose capitalism if he doesn't win a primary. (It'll be interesting to watch as the political landscape evolves.)

I still think income caps and a capital gains tax are entirely feasible. All we need is for people to vote for it.

2. Opposing capitalism can affect job creation in the private sector, where everything is about profit. Since this is the US thread, it's worth noting that the New Deal created government jobs.

This is why I proposed creating government jobs constitutionally in the Capitalism thread, not just on the whim of one generation or another.

That's a good point. Again the US are a nice case study on how to avoid this: right now there's a labor shortage. (And that was trivially easy to achieve: make sure people have a little bit of help and aren't just desperate about finding a job helps a lot.)

(Though I'm still in favor of creating government jobs.)

[Rounin Ryuuji]

But I'm not sure appealing to reality works here. There's no example of a socialist system actually working. ("socialist" meant again, in the seize-the-means-of-production sense. Milder forms of socialism gave much better results.)

I must have misunderstood; I thought you were saying that discussing who owned the means of production was pointless. I don't think seizing it and shifting the concentration is useful, but I think a discussion of what forms of capital ownership, and how much should be permitted, certainly are.

UBI would help a lot, but it's never going to be enough (it probably won't pay your mortgage.)

And why not? As mechanisation of manufacturing continues, and more jobs simply cease to exist, there will come a point when there will be more people than there is work for them to do. It's eventually going to have to, so we might as well get to work on it now.

The sums involved are huge. For a UBI of $1000 a month (which is really low compared to what I understand of cost of living in the US), we're talking about half the federal budget, for instance. Now you need to get that kind of budget past the voters and Congress.
In the long run (a couple generations or so) more may be possible, who knows?

That is not "never" — it isn't anywhere near "never". And if we tax the wealthy fairly, and tax wealth, and cut some of the ridiculous military spending so that it's maybe only twice what China spends rather than three or four times.

There's also some issue with treating people as something for which there's a "market". Capital-centered thinking has gone quite a way too far, and it's time to rein that in.

That's a metaphor, and probably a useful one. There is such a thing as a supply and demand of labor. You can find evidence of them under feudalism or even communism.

While there is a supply for it, and a demand for it, we shouldn't conceive of participation in a labour market as something necessary to human existence. Perhaps I misread you, but there's a general idea that "unemployment is bad"; as long as people are not harmed by unemployment. Also bearing in mind that stay at home parents are not usually considered "employed", but they do useful and necessary work, "unemployment" can free up people who are good at, and enjoy, work that does not ordinarily pay. Studies on UBI seem to indicate that it also increases economic activity overall because it stimulates otherwise risk-averse individuals who may have good ideas to take risks on those maybe-good ideas.

[qupte]

It's worth keeping in mind that coops tend to increase unemployment, so they might be counterproductive in the long run. (When given a choice, owner-employees will favor higher wages over recruiting.)

This is a problem? Again, we don't need to rely on the private sector to provide work either way. [/quote]
Of course it's a problem. State budgets aren't unlimited.

Check out the example of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia's economic system ran on co-ops. The unemployment rate in the 80s was the highest in Europe (as high as 20%). A significant part of the workforce ended up as guest workers in West Germany, and that was about the best solution anyone could find.
(On the whole Yugoslavia did a lot better than the Eastern Bloc though. The lesson here is probably that there's no magic bullet, not that co-ops are bad.)
[/quote]
Yugoslavia was also not a developed Western country existing at this point in history, much less one with the enormous resources of the United States. This goes back to the point about UBI — people likely weren't stuffed into unnecessary jobs, consequently there was higher unemployment. The private sector also isn't limitless — it is, in fact, far more finite than what governments are able to do. If people getting paid well for doing work means some people collect UBI and pursue non-paying things, I don't see an actual problem here.

It depends on what the company does. Privately-owned utilities are usually bad.

Yeah. But I think it's still hard to figure out what works and what doesn't. For instance, we have a weird private/public mix thing going on here for telecommunications networks and internet/telephone providers. On paper it doesn't look like it should work but it does. (It's way cheaper and better than in the US, but also a lot cheaper than the old state monopoly.)
[/quote]
I'm all for the proof being in the pudding. Private and public competing is an idea to which I'm more than open, as long as it does not overproduce in a wasteful fashion (it is hard to do this with telecommunications). I would describe myself as a "distributist" rather than "socialist", though I do have a mild-socialist and anti-capitalist bent.

(Nationalizing huge parts of the economy has been tried in France, most recently in 1981. Long story short, the results turned out disappointing.)

I've read about that; my guess is that neither large-scale nationalisation with direct State control (where I think it might be good to experiment, I've touched on already, is where it could give ordinary people access to the means of researching, developing, and manufacturing new things, functioning more like a public library than a State monopoly), nor mass privatisation, are likely to do what they're sold as doing. Nationalising resources and such does seem sensible, but nationalising other things... really depends on what they are.

Again the US are a nice case study on how to avoid this: right now there's a labor shortage. (And that was trivially easy to achieve: make sure people have a little bit of help and aren't just desperate about finding a job helps a lot.)

(Though I'm still in favor of creating government jobs.)

I'm actually very happy about the labour shortage, but unhappy about how businesses and the like seem to be responding to it — perpetuating the myth of people being generally lazy (people are generally easily bored), rather than acknowledging the faults of the system, and the fact that people won't work demeaning jobs if they don't have to. I'm really hoping it will force things to change, but I'm not holding my breath.

[Moose-tache]

...aaand abortion is effectively illegal in Texas. I doubt this law will stand for more than a year or two, but it has better survival chances than similar laws because it passes enforcement onto citizens. Instead of the government punishing you for having an abortion, this law allows private citizens to sue you for it. It's brilliant. Evil, but brilliant.

[alice]

...aaand abortion is effectively illegal in Texas. I doubt this law will stand for more than a year or two, but it has better survival chances than similar laws because it passes enforcement onto citizens. Instead of the government punishing you for having an abortion, this law allows private citizens to sue you for it. It's brilliant. Evil, but brilliant.

But they failed to take into account the power of millions of nefarious individuals to flood the system with fake information.

[rotting bones]

Survive, in what sense? Did you mean "survive politically", or did you mean that in a more literal, CIA-black-ops sense?

They can't remain in position to continue doing what they were doing. One way or another, the system will remove them from power. Sometimes they're assassinated, but that's vastly more common in Africa than the US.

I think right now the problem is with the voters. I'm always amazed at how much American politics have moved left, but democratic socialism still seems to be a minority taste. Bernie Sanders can't oppose capitalism if he doesn't win a primary. (It'll be interesting to watch as the political landscape evolves.)

I still think income caps and a capital gains tax are entirely feasible. All we need is for people to vote for it.

Why would voters vote for socialism when socialist politicians can't actually implement socialism? People say they aren't enthusiastic about Bernie Sanders because they know his policies cannot be made to work in America's governmental machinery.

That's a good point. Again the US are a nice case study on how to avoid this: right now there's a labor shortage. (And that was trivially easy to achieve: make sure people have a little bit of help and aren't just desperate about finding a job helps a lot.)

Pro-worker capitalism has never lasted long. Compare business cycles.

(Though I'm still in favor of creating government jobs.)

There is no sustainable way to create government jobs that I know of without nationalizing industries.

[Ares Land]

...aaand abortion is effectively illegal in Texas. I doubt this law will stand for more than a year or two, but it has better survival chances than similar laws because it passes enforcement onto citizens. Instead of the government punishing you for having an abortion, this law allows private citizens to sue you for it. It's brilliant. Evil, but brilliant.

I read up a bit on this today; I'm amazed at how there's nothing right with that law. Every single detail feels wrong. It's political nastiness taken to a fractal level.

Is that sort of legal hack actually constitutional?

They can't remain in position to continue doing what they were doing. One way or another, the system will remove them from power. Sometimes they're assassinated, but that's vastly more common in Africa than the US.

I don't know, FDR served three terms and his economic legacy lasted until Reagan. The system lived with it.
Granted the New Deal isn't socialism, but it's not exactly Objectivism either.

Why would voters vote for socialism when socialist politicians can't actually implement socialism? People say they aren't enthusiastic about Bernie Sanders because they know his policies cannot be made to work in America's governmental machinery.

That's an interesting assertion, but I'd love to see proof of that!

That's a good point. Again the US are a nice case study on how to avoid this: right now there's a labor shortage. (And that was trivially easy to achieve: make sure people have a little bit of help and aren't just desperate about finding a job helps a lot.)

Pro-worker capitalism has never lasted long. Compare business cycles.

Oh, I mean, sure, it's not going to last. But I think it's a nice demonstration of how welfare (or, you know, UBI, if we ever manage to get it) would improve the situation for about everyone.

(Though I'm still in favor of creating government jobs.)

There is no sustainable way to create government jobs that I know of without nationalizing industries.

I don't know, how about libraries, social services, schools, government administration (local, at State level or federal)? Public works? Even in the US the federal government is a huge employer.

[rotting bones]

Everything I'm saying assumes there aren't nonstop worker protests like in FDR's time.

The US government's current employment rate isn't enough to let everyone who's looking for a job find one.

[Nachtswalbe]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FAz1FjSWYAE ... ame=medium
There are advocates of “National Divorce” along red-blue/urban-rural lines

[Travis B.]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FAz1FjSWYAE ... ame=medium
There are advocates of “National Divorce” along red-blue/urban-rural lines

The problem with that would be that it would allow the Republicans to lord over the red areas, when the real goal ought to be to exclude them from power in as much of an area as possible.

[Nachtswalbe]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FAz1FjSWYAE ... ame=medium
There are advocates of “National Divorce” along red-blue/urban-rural lines

The problem with that would be that it would allow the Republicans to lord over the red areas, when the real goal ought to be to exclude them from power in as much of an area as possible.

That’s the exact goal of these … advocates - cut off any opposition and cause most of it to flee so you can lord over your impoverished rump state with an iron fist

[Rounin Ryuuji]

It might be useful to note that a lot of that "red" is uninhabited, so actually chopping the country up geographically rather than corralling the red voters into some much smaller chunk of land would be more sensible (not that I think actually doing either is a good idea) —

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