United States Politics Thread 46

[Nortaneous]

When your grandfather was most likely a young man home ownership (and car-ownership) rates were lower than they are now, people used less energy and spent a larger portion of their income on food.

It's nontrivial to find economic statistics from more than a few years before 1970, but the ratio of the median home price to the median household income has increased substantially since then - maybe homeownership rates were lower, but homeownership was still more affordable.

If you buy the analysis of noted far-right extremist Elizabeth Warren, household income gains in the last few decades have been outpaced by the costs of necessary positional goods.

No doubt a lot of people think their grandpa just had a "regular job," either because we underestimate just how high up the value-added ladder jobs like "master plumber" were in the pre-digital age,

Where did "master plumber" come from?

An actual "regular" guy would be chronically unemployed, always on the edge of not having sufficient clothing or fuel or food, and shivering in a tiny GI bill Cape Cod that didn't sell for half a mil because it was demolished years ago.

At what point was the median American unemployed?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

My grandfather had some kind of sitcom dad job and was able to buy a house, two cars, and an RV, and send his kids to college, without running into financial difficulties, and without his wife having to get a job. His house, which was in an area that no reasonable person would describe as "good", sold for half a million dollars.

Exhibit A. It's crazy that people actually believe this nonsense...

On the paternal one side, my grandparents lived somewhat like that — the grandfather was a chiropractor, the grandmother a housewife, though when her husband died, she did operate a catering business, then a tea-room, though she didn't need extra income, and they had a nice house with three bedrooms, two full bathrooms, real mahogany and silver, fine china, and so on. They were above the median for their time, but not extremely wealthy. The children broadly lived about as well as their parents.

On the maternal side, my grandfather was unstable, and this seems to have caused a great deal of hardship. Women couldn't really make it on their own well at the time, so it might be arguable that women have a better position now, being better able to function as individuals, than they did then. Society isn't totally unimproved from the past. The children, incidentally, went on to live better than their parents.

My stepfather's parents had a smaller (but still comfortable) house, the grandmother did work, but had a comfortable job with Sears (then a well-respected company), and did have time enough to bring up five children. These children all had university educations, and went on to live better than their parents.

Now it's the reverse: twentysomethings don't see jobs or lives that are as comfortable as their parents'.

I think it's well up into the 30's. The "millennial" generation is getting pretty old now.

[Ares Land]

I wanted to bring up Piketty, but I see MacAnDàil already did.

This graph, from Piketty, would explain a lot in the latest discussion: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/ideologie/pdf/G11.7.pdf
(Pardon the French. The red curve is the average income of the 50% poorest, the green one the 1% richest. On the left-hand, figures for the richest 1%, on the right-hand, figures for the poorest.)

Note that 'the 50% poorest' includes a whole lot of the middle-class. Income for the lowest 50% is basically stagnant; the graph is self-explanotary as to what happened to the top 1%. Despite near-constant growth over the period: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1

All in all I'm not terribly surprised to see Americans discuss socialism seriously!

[Rounin Ryuuji]

All in all I'm not terribly surprised to see Americans discuss socialism seriously!

One might prefer to "fix" Capitalism, but it seems it has a wonderful penchant for re-breaking itself.

[hwhatting]

One might prefer to "fix" Capitalism, but it seems it has a wonderful penchant for re-breaking itself.

Every system deteriorates over time and needs constant work and reforms. Every system anyone will ever come up with will have the same problem - people learn to game it for their own advantage to the detriment of others; many people will try to amass advantages and power; positions will become entrenched; and lastly, people will get used to the good sides of the system, forget about the bad sides of what it replaced, and detect new things that suck and need to be changed. Classical Marxism was very good at dignosing the problems of Capitalism, but its eschatological idea of achieving an ideal society without contradictions if only one dismantled Capitalism was incredibly naive.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

One might prefer to "fix" Capitalism, but it seems it has a wonderful penchant for re-breaking itself.

Every system deteriorates over time and needs constant work and reforms. Every system anyone will ever come up with will have the same problem - people learn to game it for their own advantage to the detriment of others; many people will try to amass advantages and power; positions will become entrenched; and lastly, people will get used to the good sides of the system, forget about the bad sides of what it replaced, and detect new things that suck and need to be changed. Classical Marxism was very good at dignosing the problems of Capitalism, but its eschatological idea of achieving an ideal society without contradictions if only one dismantled Capitalism was incredibly naive.

I wouldn't call myself a "Classical Marxist" in the sense of thinking society will ever reach an ideal state, though I do think the problems of Capitalism would be best addressed by a fairly radical structural change to both the domestic economy of the United States, and globally. The conventional Communist model (where the State owns everything) isn't anywhere near something I think of as ideal. I've identified myself before as more "Distributist" — and strongly "environmentalist" — than "Socialist", though I do like a lot of policies that would likely be referred to as "socialism" (I also think a great deal of means testing is extremely wasteful when that money could, instead, be funding the programme itself further), and certainly support caps on both wealth ownership and income, wealth taxes, and so on, and so on.

[rotting bones]

//Antihistamine-induced rant containing no useful information

Politically, I identify as a democrat (not the American political party). I'm more of a Marxist than an environmentalist. (Personally, I hate the 21st century "left", academic "intellectualism", "organic" nature, all traditional cultures and all likely futures. What I like is particle physics, which replaces reactionary delusions like respect and honor with an infinite field of equal laws.) I oppose Capitalism because half the time, Capitalism produces more undesirable outcomes when it "works" than when it "breaks". I am not getting into this again because I've run the gamut from math to parable trying to explain it in the Capitalism thread. That said, there are some things I hate worse than Capitalism. I'd rather live in an honest libertarian dystopia than under neoliberal "centrism" or even a "Distributist" society that enforces Catholic social teaching. In 21st century politics, libertarians are the only significant faction that has kept alive the free spirit of Marxist materialism.

[Travis B.]

I consider myself to be a socialist, as should be obvious here, but at the same time I am not a Marxist—while Marx did point out many of the flaws of capitalism, the eschatological aspects of his theories have not borne themselves out. At the same time I very much am against big-C Communism, as I consider it to be state capitalism, and not better than private capitalism (and in many cases even worse). I believe that democracy, as opposed to the private authoritarianism of capitalism and the state authoritarianism of Communism, is critical at all levels of society, from the very bottom to the very top. As I have repeated many times on here, I am for collective worker ownership and self-management of capital, collective tenant ownership and self-management of housing, and collective ownership and management by the people of resources and the environment. The closest thing to state capitalism I would support is state investment in worker-owned-and-managed companies in lieu of private investment in capitalist companies.

[Torco]

Surely you would also agree that any socialist polity, hell any anticapitalist country of any kind, is going to need to defend itself from invasion, colonialization and subversion efforts from the capitalist powers, and this can't very well be managed privately by coops: in wartime even the 'democratic' economies of the UK, or the states, were strongly centrally controlled as a matter of necessity. Also, even while capitalism is in place, you need to have state control over *some* industries, no? even act as the capitalist in them, to ensure a minimum level of economic and social democracy: you know, roads and healthcare, police, maybe ensure some basic telecom, water and power access to people as a matter of human rights? housing seems like a pretty important human right which capitalism is kind of shite at providing for everyone, and the homelessness crisis is not just a thing of the UK. surely it, as well, ought to be just built, if people need it and private investors aren't providing it.

The thing with coop-and-markets based socialism is that it's not going to be very substantively different from capitalism if that's all you do, and we're gonna need to move past capitalism eventually, I mean, it's literally destroying the planet -and it's destroying ourselves too, and for that you need to get rid, yes, of exploitation, but also of the profit motive as the main driver of the economy. I'm all for decentralization of power, don't get me wrong, and we can do a lot these days with computers in terms of just planning, or something else what do i know, but we can't keep doing this ''look, billionaires decide everything, and they grow their power by extracting more value from the rest of us" thing.

[Nortaneous]

Polities shmolities. If you can figure out how to become ungovernable you don't even have to think in terms of countries.

Is income the correct measure? If your wealth isn't in financial instruments or real estate, you're poor by definition. What's the wealth distribution over time like?

According to some site called "dqydj", 10% of households in the US have seven figures or more of net worth. Wild! I feel poor now.

[Ares Land]

Is income the correct measure? If your wealth isn't in financial instruments or real estate, you're poor by definition. What's the wealth distribution over time like?

According to some site called "dqydj", 10% of households in the US have seven figures or more of net worth. Wild! I feel poor now.

Good point. Income isn't necessarily the correct measure. The situation is even worse with wealth than it is with income.

Here's the top 1%'s share of total wealth over time: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/ideologie/pdf/G10.5.pdf; the United States are in light blue. Their share of total wealth went from 25% in 1980 to 40%.
For the 10%: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/ideologie/pdf/G10.4.pdf the proportion went from 65% to 75%

Surely you would also agree that any socialist polity, hell any anticapitalist country of any kind, is going to need to defend itself from invasion, colonialization and subversion efforts from the capitalist powers, and this can't very well be managed privately by coops: in wartime even the 'democratic' economies of the UK, or the states, were strongly centrally controlled as a matter of necessity.

Another good point. I'm generally in favor of stakeholder management, but not as the one and only answer. There's a very good case to be made for nationalizing banks and the energy sector.

There is in addition the question of unemployment. The government will be held responsible for unemployment; it might have well have the means to create jobs directly.

[Travis B.]

Surely you would also agree that any socialist polity, hell any anticapitalist country of any kind, is going to need to defend itself from invasion, colonialization and subversion efforts from the capitalist powers, and this can't very well be managed privately by coops: in wartime even the 'democratic' economies of the UK, or the states, were strongly centrally controlled as a matter of necessity. Also, even while capitalism is in place, you need to have state control over *some* industries, no? even act as the capitalist in them, to ensure a minimum level of economic and social democracy: you know, roads and healthcare, police, maybe ensure some basic telecom, water and power access to people as a matter of human rights? housing seems like a pretty important human right which capitalism is kind of shite at providing for everyone, and the homelessness crisis is not just a thing of the UK. surely it, as well, ought to be just built, if people need it and private investors aren't providing it.

About key functions of society, have you thought of state investment in worker cooperatives to provide them funding for things that are necessary for society but which are not profitable in and of themselves? E.g. in capitalist countries like the US, much of what the government does is in practice contracted out to other entities. I do not see why a socialist polity would necessarily have to be any different, except that said entities would be worker-owned and self-managed in nature. Of course, such entities would likely be combined horizontally into federations and like rather than collections of competing companies.

The thing with coop-and-markets based socialism is that it's not going to be very substantively different from capitalism if that's all you do, and we're gonna need to move past capitalism eventually, I mean, it's literally destroying the planet -and it's destroying ourselves too, and for that you need to get rid, yes, of exploitation, but also of the profit motive as the main driver of the economy. I'm all for decentralization of power, don't get me wrong, and we can do a lot these days with computers in terms of just planning, or something else what do i know, but we can't keep doing this ''look, billionaires decide everything, and they grow their power by extracting more value from the rest of us" thing.

The key thing is that state capitalism, aka big-C Communism was no better in these regards that private capitalism. Big-C Communism was horrible all around, both for the workers or for the environment. And it was highly inefficient too, such that private capitalists did not need to make up their own propaganda against it, as it provided plenty of propaganda against itself for them.

[Raphael]

Is income the correct measure? If your wealth isn't in financial instruments or real estate, you're poor by definition.

Are you being sarcastic? I've never owned any serious financial instruments or real estate, and I've never felt poor. I mean, I've always had enough to eat and drink, a place to sleep, decent clothes to wear, good health care... what am I missing? As far as I can see, while I am low income by the standards of wealthy countries, I'm only "poor" if you define poor as "not rich".

[Ares Land]

What Nortaneous is alluding to, I think, is that wealth is a better indicator than income in determining whether someone is rich. (Personally, I'd use wealth and property as the dividing line between middle class and rich.)

It's different for Americans besides: American retirement plans are financial investments, for instance.

[Nortaneous]

Is income the correct measure? If your wealth isn't in financial instruments or real estate, you're poor by definition.

Are you being sarcastic?

No. Are you? Your entire net worth is in cash? Like, in a bank?

In America, if you're not poor, you at least have a 401k and an IRA. You probably also own your home, and have other investments besides.

It isn't necessarily great that the populace is so exposed to the real estate market, but it's the only alternative to feudalism, so we take it anyway. Renting sucks.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Why should we consider Capitalism fundamentally different from feudalism? The structure appears to have shifted from manors and estates being nexuses of the economy, to various private commercial enterprises being this instead (the system being too volatile apparently for new noble titles to develop and entrench themselves), however this represents a shift merely from formal aristocracy to an owner class, which at points in history with little regulation gave us not only the Gilded Age, but also a thriving plantation economy dependent upon the continuation of the reanimation of the shambling corpse of chattel slavery. As Feudalism would view serfs as property, so is Capitalism perfectly contented to consider human beings as potentially capital. The fortunate timing of the Enlightenment (at least for some sectors of the population) curbs the excess somewhat, but "renting" from your "landlord" is not all that notionally different from being a tenant farmer or some other person required to pay in a portion of one's proceeds to some overclass.

Also, social housing appears to be doing very well in Austria, though I don't have any moral objection to owning one's own home if one wishes to. When it comes to accumulating housing one doesn't need, however, there comes a time when one must call that objectionably feudalesque.

[MacAnDàil]

Is income the correct measure? If your wealth isn't in financial instruments or real estate, you're poor by definition.

Are you being sarcastic?

No. Are you? Your entire net worth is in cash? Like, in a bank?

In America, if you're not poor, you at least have a 401k and an IRA. You probably also own your home, and have other investments besides.

It isn't necessarily great that the populace is so exposed to the real estate market, but it's the only alternative to feudalism, so we take it anyway. Renting sucks.

Renting does suck. It works out like a regressive tax. I'll maybe look up what a 401K might be. And IRA outwith Ireland.

[MacAnDàil]

Wait. They're both retirement plans? That's like a built-in function in the European countries I know.

[Raphael]

Kinda weird that Nort is so insistent that I'm really poor, given that he's politically close to a camp whose members have apparently, in other contexts, asserted that everyone who owns a cellphone and whose clothes aren't rags is wealthy.

Wait. They're both retirement plans? That's like a built-in function in the European countries I know.

It's a built-in function in the USA too, but apparently, everyone who can afford to prefers to have something else in addition to it.

[Nortaneous]

As Feudalism would view serfs as property, so is Capitalism perfectly contented to consider human beings as potentially capital. The fortunate timing of the Enlightenment (at least for some sectors of the population) curbs the excess somewhat, but "renting" from your "landlord" is not all that notionally different from being a tenant farmer or some other person required to pay in a portion of one's proceeds to some overclass.

just wait til you find out about "property tax"

Kinda weird that Nort is so insistent that I'm really poor, given that he's politically close to a camp whose members have apparently, in other contexts, asserted that everyone who owns a cellphone and whose clothes aren't rags is wealthy.

I don't know what you're referring to

Wait. They're both retirement plans? That's like a built-in function in the European countries I know.

It's a built-in function in the USA too, but apparently, everyone who can afford to prefers to have something else in addition to it.

yes - Social Security is unlikely to pay out at all for my generation (and it wasn't a good idea anyway - consider all the negative externalities of the tyrant FDR creating a govt-mandated identity number)