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Originally Posted by HomelessLoser
LOL CD is even more irrelevant than Twitter!
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Originally Posted by HomelessLoser
He never claimed it was.
Individual productivity is at all-time record highs -- but worker compensation has fallen behind for literally decades.
Automation will accelerate regardless of Andrew; the point is to manage it
I can't tell whether you're being deceptive or are merely deceived yourself.
You are one of those people who do not understand technology, the economy, or history.
Or are pretending to appear as such.
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Originally Posted by HomelessLoser
Yeah it's like he mixes sshhiitt up so it's hard to tell whether he's outright lying or just confused.
I mean critique Andrew's proposals by all means -- but critique his proposals, not some strawman of a bogeyman from one's own imagination!
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Originally Posted by HomelessLoser
What makes it hard to respond to you is that you've got things all mixed up...you seem to be referencing disparate concepts that haven't anything to do with one another, like some conspiracy theorist tying together 9/11, Planet X, autism and vaccines and Operation Jade Helm....
It does require a certain length of knowledge-chain in order to grasp Andrew's ideas but you seem to have pasted together a ransom note of a misunderstanding and pinned it on him.
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Originally Posted by BornintheSprings
Once he started claiming Yang was a libertarian capitalist I lost all interest in his views on the matter.
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Originally Posted by HomelessLoser
LOL now you're just making up your own terms....
No, you're just making that up as well.
LOL you should write for comic books or soap operas the way you spin such a word salad.
Yeah so what? The guy got speaking fees and is holding a fund-raiser -- like literally everyone else has to do until his Democracy Dollars proposal gets passed. |
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Originally Posted by HomelessLoser
Yeah that's an old Bernie Bro talking point ("libertarian capitalist Trojan Horse," etc.) but I was curious whether he's genuinely confused or simply lying.
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Originally Posted by BornintheSprings
I think hes on the far left and they really hate Yang its crazy.
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Originally Posted by HomelessLoser
Yep, the traditional circular firing squad of The Left...nothing so bitter as fratricide!
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I don't have the time to respond to each post separately so I'll just give out a general response to these series of claims.
Firstly I always claimed that I could be wrong about everything, I just have certain angles I view things from that might be different from yours.
You could agree, disagree, or maybe I'm just wrong, I've never claimed to be particularly smart to that is always a possibility.
Any campaign brings out the passion of its supporters and some times that leads to conflict with people you would usually agree with. I'm not voting but I appreciate conversations with supporters of people I view in a negative light.
For Yang it does not come from a question of tactic. I don't look at policies as factors that contain principles nor am I particularly attached to any one or any series of political ideology.
More so what I believe should be the emphasis is vision. What type of society do you want to live in, and how do you get there?
Despite popular belief many candidates do not agree on the end goal, and many people find what is good to mean vastly different things.
I've read about Yang and his policies and I find him manipulative to say the least. Strong words, I know; and I'm not trying to antagonize his supporters but he (Yang) sees the world reactively as if it is some natural body that evolves without deliberation or reason.
He uses this to argue automation is inevitable. Automation itself is something that has been happening since the 1790s, but Yang claims this 'fourth industrial revolution' will be radically different from everything else and robots will take over the job market.
What's interesting is this comes from a line of thinking that R&D is sourced from private ventures looking to lower costs and increase the bottom end of a company. The problem?
Most companies don't participate in preliminary R&D research to evolve the function of modern technology; the problem that arises is that if you are a multinational corporation with investments in multiple different industries the risk is too high to pour the necessary amount of capital into a venture with unknown results. You see modern day companies, since the 1890s, have price management branches that evaluate the cost/gain dynamic between any venture. Unknowns are dangerous because there is a certain quota is needed to be met for the next fiscal quarter. A developed company usually doesn't have high value angel investors to lean back on so they need to cover
future costs.
Say 200 years ago holding companies would rarely have a long term plan because markets would be stable for longer periods of time. Today its not just about technology, but consumption habits.
If revenues in the next 20 years are going towards subscription based payments and live service then a company has to plan the transition. That transition requires capital, and that requires stable cost/gain evaluations.
Hypothetical technologies don't implement marketing changes, as that is rooted in finance, not industry. Production is no longer the main source of GDP from the private sector, today that's finance and consumption. Habits like that are based in pricing schemes to maximize market attraction. Not industrial output. Besides off shoring labor companies like Apple offshore management as well as they no longer have internal knowledge on supply chains.
The technology that is first developed comes from the public sector. In both China and the United States. The most obvious example of this is university funding, but more fundamental is military spending; with a focus on technological innovation most of the basic functions developed on the subsidized market allows for distribution down to private business.
The most ambitious R&D project in the private sector right now is self driving autonomous vehicles.
The original distribution of this technology came from Navlab on projects directly funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency).
ROBOT CARS - autonomous vehicles - history of self-driving cars - best robot car
The reason why 'innovation' is so important for static governments is two fold: national security and domestic stability.
The first one is obvious, we don't want our enemies to have access to powerful cyber or military hardware we don't have access to.
The second is more interesting; military policy does have to protect against blow-back from their current policies, but foriegn policy right now is dictated mainly on domestic issues.
You see despite all the foriegn capital we have influence over thanks to the dollar being the world's reserve currency, the IMF influencing fiscal policy in developing states, and naval domination creating a monopoly on open seas trade routes, the government is funded directly by domestic tax income.
Not off shore havens or multinational investments in the Philippines, but domestic income; people generally mistake income for being production based, but the majority of it comes from consumption. When you shop somewhere, say at a fast food joint, the revenue you create is directly forwarded to a larger investment fund or corporate balance sheet.
That money is derived from your checkbook, which is in turn stimulated by internal credit loans. Most people have a job salaries, but that value is not enough to afford basic capital that allows stability; housing being the primary example.
Without collateral or equity a person can't afford basic medical emergencies or high level costs. The consumption economy is low priced thanks to state intervention in the global market to keep our supply chains up and running, but consumer goods is only one factor to life.
Our economy is stimulated by the housing market and total costs like irrigation/electricity/and property taxes that come with them incentivized organized work, or in other words participation in the taxable economy. If people started living like Yeoman farmers total revenue would collapse and that means the government will no longer be functional.
For first time buyers the fractional reserve banking system is based on an internal loan sharing market between investment banks. The money you put into an account is an open fund for the bank to loan out at will. They usually only keep a total of 5% liquidity to allow for withdrawals, but most of your real world money doesn't exist anymore.
If too many people start withdrawing at once, the bank seeks a loan from other investment banks to stabilize total liquidity. When during a financial crisis this happens to multiple banks at the same time the federal reserve steps in to pay off outstanding debts and to keep the institutions afloat.
This could seem counter intuitive in the long run, but without this system costs would have to be balanced by wages since excessive credit would no longer be a feasible option for a consumer economy. If that happens speculation on land prices would have to cease and most importantly, wide scale urbanization and concentration of high demand labor will no longer be justified as costs would be to high; add the problems with car ownership, lower gas sales, and lower paid jobs, the federal government would face a collapse in revenue.
First entitlement funding won't have strong legs to stand on, military investment would become harder to maintain, and upholding global hegemony would harder than ever. The consequences would cyclical but generally all the high standard low priced goods that populate even the most far out localities will be gone, meat supply would collapse and prices would expand, basic welfare/public security would be downgraded and societal organization based on street planning and class segregation would become obsolete. Obviously such an immediate upheaval would be destructive towards everyone.
In order to maintain order most modern states have found better alternatives to fear/respect of a king, or even the social contract; rather they prefer an unengaged society that is socially complacent with distractions and instant gratification. The latter requires constant upkeep by private companies in decreasing unmarketable time individuals spend in their daylight hours; the more time people are spent engaged in entertainment/marketing content, the greater difference they can create between gratification response. This is a narrow road as progress does not stay, and the only noticeable difference is when time is cut down.
(EX: Amazon can continue to lower delivery dates, but by the time they reach a difference of hours in delivery time, the less growth potential they have).
This goes back to the marketing aspect of consumer faced companies, they focus on innovation in payment schemes and consumer interaction, the development of which is based around consumption, not labor, being the primary driver of economic activity in the country.
In short society does not develop in a naturalistic fashion like Adam Smith's invisible hand, a concept Andrew Yang buys into, but is rather deliberately nurtured to produce the best outcome for speculative money and finance. This isn't selfish in its entirety, as it is a choice most of society buys into.
The alternate of this statement is that the society we move forward with is also deliberate in nature and not an inevitable force.
Productivity compared to pass decades has slowed down, and investment into experimental robotics is limited as private business prefers Government bonds. If you watch the Stoller video I gave you underneath the other two links he does a better job of explaining it than I.
Furthermore trucking jobs exist for a reason, and they have a
labor shortage for a reason. There are reasons trucking is such a high demand business and there is a reason that it is under supplied, reasons that predate automobile automation.
The shipment industry has been a byproduct of the consumer industry post 1974, and the low labor supply is a product of a low pay/time ratio that most Americans can't afford to give combined with a lower contingent of migrant labor in that industry.
The point is automation is not some natural force developed recently to fill in a social demand for Americans, its a situational product of our society that has not yet come to fruition.
The question goes back to what type of society you want to live in. Most Americans don't ask themselves this question because they are depleted from traditional attachments to society by an obsession with market based consumption replacing social roles.
The jobs that are being automated did not originate from a social structure like in Medieval Tibet, but the deliberate planning of international finance. Whereas local ice cream trucks or banking trusts did not produce the highest outcome in terms of taxable income, they doubled as a social structure that kept communities interactive with one another producing civil society. Labor itself has been deprived from societal growth and has become a means to an end, whether you enjoy the work or not.
If the stock market was an inevitable creation of civil society, then it makes sense for Billionaires to prepare us for trillonaires. Wealth is no longer about how much money you control, but the investment value of your capital that appreciates with market share.
If we live in a world that ranks credit above stability, growth above cooperation, control above freedom, or individual ambition over individual rights, then this reality is inevitable.
The rich are right to prepare us for that future because despite the overwhelming wealth inequality it may entail, if we want stock markets to increase in value, so will the arbitrary number at the end of a CEOs total valuation.
And its not a question of decentralizing stock ownership as capital needs to be managed from the top down to produce wealth; this is where the attraction to control above freedom comes from. If large quantities of liquidity are too be centralized to promote economic growth, then the capital needs to be managed executive, even if the actual ownership is more diverse. That is how companies move profits to new outcomes so quickly with a bureaucratic slow down.
Policies of centralized control over capital are the same as authoritarian governments like Marcus Aurelius, Lycurgus, Stalin, and private investors like JP Morgan or John D Rockefeller.
The masses have to be equalized in order to increase economic mobilization. This is what private businesses do to their work force, and it is the same economic model political leaders in the past have used to hyper leap output.
Lycurgus for example changed the financial system so that money is derived from Iron Ingots and bartering; in effect this limited wealth accumulation by independent merchants and forced the lower class to pool together resources to develop communal housing. The effect was a massively mobilized egalitarian work force that could be managed by the top (Spartan Government) to meet a collective goal. The end result was the hyper jump of Sparta's military ahead of all global competitors.
For the same reason collective goals can only be organized by independent management of wide swaths of capital.
Again this is a choice society must consider. Organizing power into the hands of a few most 'gifted' can direct policy towards the same maximized income the government needs and that keeps the population submissive.
Andrew Yang does not find the question of capital concentration as a policy question because he sees it as a predetermined choice of society.
Rather than question the usage of financial authoritarianism on our country he offers market forward solutions that use the situation to produce more equitable outcomes.
There is a reason silicon valley executives love him so much, and its not just because he shares a similar origin as they do. Rather it is because he considers their power legitimate from the fact that it exists and people must work their way around it.
Instead of questioning the distribution of land capital or pricing, he makes abstract arguments about finding alternative housing (like shipping containers) that do not deter the process of urbanization or land speculation. His UBI policy is funded by a tax on automated production; but revenue funding is the number one structure that decrees policy.
If the revenue source is depleted, then so is the policy and its central theme in a Yang administration.
Today our income brackets are tax in a heavily progressive fashion. This means all welfare policies are derived from private sector investments by big money capital. That is where the highest source or revenue is derived from.
This forces politicians into a corner where if they want to keep a certain social funding measure, they need to alternatively support public infrastructure to prioritize rent seeking behavior on the domestic economy. In the end this has a cyclical affect of raising prices on private public goods (traditional public goods that are privately supplied like healthcare or housing; these goods have a low elasticity rate meaning changes in pricing have little affect on total demand for that product; in essence this gives the private industry a monopoly on exploiting prices for maximum profits) which necessitates the same public welfare that the investment is funding in the first place.
This leads down a rabbit hole of increased spending competing alternatively with increase private investment in the bond market, real estate, or other stable sources of appreciation (again, not preliminary R&D which doesn't guarantee the same output).
Yang would face the same problems with his UBI policy but to a more extreme degree; whereas welfare is more controlled in its outcome, UBI offers liberties in that money can now be spent in two other places: the consumer market or the investment market. I get Yang claims this will help fund small businesses, but the funding of UBI doesn't come from mom and pop shops, but large capital liquidity that controls a fleet of robotic labor.
If the benefactor and the funder don't have cooperative relationship, then the necessary economic structure for the latter can undermine the purpose of the former.
That again leaves two options besides public resources like welfare: consumption and investment. I believe I've already gone over the history of consumption and capital investment and why they have been deliberately promoted so that we live in the highly organized materialistic society.
In terms of UBI I believe Yang is mistaken, not fraudulent or deceptive.
Where the deceptiveness comes into display is his narrative about how society should be developed in this country. While the 'left' and the 'right' offer varying alternatives to what type of country we should be, Andrew Yang's "Not left or right, but forward" is a clever marketing trick to imply society is already on a set path, and all we can do is react to our circumstances.
It comes out most in his disdain for anti trust laws or structural reform like Glass-Steagall that decentralize capital from credit distributors and into smaller collective loan markets. The main example being credit unions.
On one hand this form of thinking is reductive in that it limits the capability of capital to collectivizes labor for a shared goal (historical evidence above). On the other it perceives cultural goals like economic cooperation and localism as being primary to utilitarian outcomes, not secondary.
But Yang's world view requires wealth to be the primary function of economic ownership. He can't entertain ideas like worker cooperatives or primitive economics because he needs private investment to have power in order to be infused with social responsibility. All other human goals are designated to personal achievement much like traditional libertarians have a tendency of doing.
Of course the question of morality and the direction our country should take is skipped over by his corporate parentalism.
Do you want people living in mud huts? Tribes, small towns? Villages? Nomadic structures? Feudal land ownership? Mass urbanization? Forestation? Ruralism? What role does religion play? Do people value wealth and efficiency over protection, communalism, or savage poverty like an old western? Is mass urbanization good? Is density or sprawl how humans should organize?
None of this is derived from personal preferences, they are deliberate structures that promote different degrees of power to different sects of people, and humanity must decide if the path we go down is making us better people. And if the goal is
better, what does that really mean? Its not about an obsession to one policy or ideology, but rather a question about who we are and what we want.
When Yang speaks of "human capitalism" he doesn't care about the motives of capital input. He doesn't question the consumer economy, our reliance on the fractional reserve banking system, or the social consequences of such inputs.
Rather he wants to redirect the output to benefit some left behind souls who aren't deemed 'efficient' by the market. The primary problems he points out in this analysis are derived from how society prefers engagement; if it is based on ambition and instant gratification then the greatest directions of investment should be in finance while the government should continue to promote imperialism as to secure external supply chains and keep external costs down.
That in turn produces an inefficient source of public engagement. Other economic structures value input to employee workers and stimulate cross bartering (individual trade with other individual producers). There are aesthetic reasons for this. I could go further and ask about the positives of longevity and the negatives, and what society views as more important: Beauty or Survival. The point being is that it inspires desire for something in society that can counter act the distractions of consumer desire that fills the void of a lack of civil engagement on the part of the wider population.
So Yang does not question the purpose of input but wants to use output to fund less 'productive' work. On one hand that can be seen as noble, on the other it can be seen as corporate parentalism. Rather than distributing power in terms of decision making on how we develop to the bottom rungs of society, Yang expects social responsibility to from the top to appease the bottom.
This isn't far from 17th century aristocratic nobility which had an unspoken duty to uplift the lesser folk. By consequence it not only deconstructs individual destiny and control, but it puts a band aid on social ills produced by isolation and once again creates a wealth gap to be bridged necessitating more capital rather than actual social participation (which is much harder to calculate and can not be derived from an investment board in wall street New York).
It ennobles and protects the people who disregard frugality and romanticism, the same people who require a high stress consumer economy to maintain speculative appreciation.
And it is deceptive for a population that has for so long never questioned what they want beyond personal mundanity and ambition to repackage the same policies that have driven American society for the past fifty years as innovative and new. It's anything but and Yang knows it as much as he understands why corporate America finds him so preferential to him and his rhetoric on freedom. Capital has held a monopoly on the word freedom to the point where consumption capacity has been equated to personal freedom; independent control of power and distribution are not considered of any importance.
And while I don't support Sanders, Williamson, Warren, or even the Koch Bros (yes, the same libertarian lite as Andrew Yang), they at least propose a direction for the country, not cynical defeatism that is meant to disengage a country already enraptured by their own problems derived from the same source as their personal satisfactions.
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