Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I marvel at the rampant misapprehension of the so-called 1%. 1% of Americans means 3.2 million people.
I'm using the term euphemistically, for the small sliver of the Western Internationalist class that seems to feel it has a divine right to decide the future and fate of all humanity without a vote or even a conference. I'm not referring to the one percent of Americans who make more than the other 99 percent. Actually, I'm really referring to a healthy portion of the 1/10 of 1 percenters, plus their political sycophants acting at their behest.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ohio_peasant
I agree that the government didn't "gin up", but consider the question of borrowing and currency-stability. Inflation? Are things appreciably more expensive today, than they were in 2007, before the bailout? Really? And what about the value of the dollar, relative to the Euro and the Yen and so forth? In 2007 the Euro was trading at around 1.6 dollars. Now it's down to 1.1 dollars.
I'm using "inflation" in the sense that the bailout was created out of thin air based on future payments and taxation to cover the cost. The bailout hasn't already been paid for. It's been added to the ledger. I was not referring to inflation of prices. On that subject however, the noticeable devaluation of the dollar has been over decades, not since 2008.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ohio_peasant
Perhaps not without some pains, the system will reform itself, yet again. Human labor will not be rendered superfluous. It might take a generation or two to sort out the ensuing imbalance, and we may be the unlucky transitional generation which is most adversely affected by shifting times. But our successors will fare better, not worse.
I think the "reforms" which are in the works now are quite different than the ordinary remedies of recent history. Going back to the "one percenters" I've mentioned, the internationalists have some very uh... interesting ideas... in the offing for what they want to impose on the world, without a vote of course. Because I do believe a certain segment of them DO in fact want to make human labour superfluous, or at least bring about a global system where human beings are treated as mere elements of an economic equation. To be adjusted as necessary, for the good of all. Like surplus livestock.
And it doesn't matter if their plans succeed or not, in the long run. What matters is that they are going to inflict a lot of unnecessary evil and misery on the world. Look at what they've already done in the Middle East and Africa over the past 50 years for starters.
Last edited by Led Zeppelin; 05-30-2015 at 12:53 PM..
I'm using the term euphemistically, for the small sliver of the Western Internationalist class that seems to feel it has a divine right to decide the future and fate of all humanity without a vote or even a conference. I'm not referring to the one percent of Americans who make more than the other 99 percent. Actually, I'm really referring to a healthy portion of the 1/10 of 1 percenters, plus their political sycophants acting at their behest.
I'm not persuaded that this global-elite is monolithic and acts in concerted fashion to advance monolithic interests. On the contrary, it seems to me that for every oil-billionaire there's a hedge-fund billionaire shorting oil, and for every drill-baby-drill billionaire enthusiast there's a save-the-arctic billionaire taking the opposite side. In fact I'd argue that much of the political paralysis in modern America (and modern Europe) is owing to our elite being fractionated, heterogeneous and split. As a counterexample, consider China: rightly or wrongly, things just get done over there. That is because their elite is indeed very tight, very small and very uniform.
Let's return again to the traditional example of riots, pitchforks and tumbrels: the French revolution. Well, the aristocracy was by definition small, with the number of titles limited by royal decree. The nobles were exempt from taxation, but discouraged (if not outright barred) from running businesses. As a result they came to be supplanted by a new class, a class of business-owners who carried the tax burden and who chaffed at social and legal restrictions against them. The nobility were uniform in their privileges and concerns; so too, to a large extent, were the Bourgeoisie (we'll allow ourselves that term). The result was revolution. If however some of the nobles paid taxes and some did not, some owned businesses but others were landowners and still others were landless stock-speculators, and some were foreigners who never set foot in France but owed substantial real-estate in Paris; and meanwhile, some of the business-owners were granted titles of nobility, some paid taxes and some did not, and so forth - the resulting mix would eliminate entrenched monolithic interests, and there could not be an array of opposing forces to foment revolution.
15 years ago I would have been persuaded that the nation-state was withering away, overcome and subsumed in its authority by international corporations. Then came the era of terrorism, and the rise of the national security states in the West, and all sorts of dictatorships elsewhere. In fact today there is a tension between corporate interests and national-government interests, rather than necessarily an alignment. Example: why haven't Iraqi oilfields become the private domain of Exxon-Mobile, Chevron and BP? Why isn't there a private militia of ruthless mercenaries enforcing order? Why couldn't the oil-industry collude to cease drilling and to spike oil prices back to $150/barrel? Maybe I'm naive, but my opinion is that corporate interests are insufficiently mutually aligned, and insufficiently powerful. And while this is bad news for shareholders (I personally have a fair amount of stock in Conoco-Phillips), it's good news for history. It means bickering and fractiousness between powerful forces, so that none get too powerful and upset the balance.
Now if only Conoco could recover some of those oil-fields that Hugo Chavez nationalized in Venezuela, I might enjoy larger quarterly dividends....
I like the idea of a strong welfare state where everyone is not only provided with the basics but also the means to contribute to society as a whole in a meaningful way.
We need to completely abandoned the 'carrot and stick' motivation style and focus on giving people a sense that by contributing to society they are contributing to something positive and worthwhile. I think that most people know that modern society is sick and destructive, and the only reason they're participating in it at all is because they're afraid of what will happen if they don't, or because they have convinced themselves that callous self-interest is actually worthwhile.
There is little point in forcing people to work in utterly pointless and meaningless jobs just because someone thinks everyone should be doing something, and the idea that we should intentionally cripple technological development so that people can do jobs that machines could do more efficiently is bonkers. In Japan, they actually hire people to wipe off the escalator handrails all day long, simply because it helps to give them something to do and saves them from the shame of unemployment-- but it should never have to come to that.
We need to completely and definitively bury free market capitalism forever, stop marketing useless crap to anyone who will buy it, stop trying to convince everyone that their life won't be complete if they don't see the new Star Wars movie, and make living more about finding a meaning to our existence and developing ourselves as human beings who can live on the planet Earth without completely ****ing it up.
Edit - my bad, this link is from a parody site. (sure wish they'd put a disclaimer at the top - aren't they exposing themselves to libel lawsuits?)
But there's no question that robots are on the verge of automating much of our unskilled workforce - I think we'll start to see massive layoffs due to this starting about 2020, and hitting crisis proportions by 2030.
Sure makes me glad I'm not a young person anymore...
Last edited by NorthStarDelight; 05-31-2015 at 07:06 AM..
A commune works only so long as society is small enough that everybody is on a first name basis with their peers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Spatula City
I like the idea of a strong welfare state where everyone is not only provided with the basics but also the means to contribute to society as a whole in a meaningful way.
We need to completely abandoned the 'carrot and stick' motivation style and focus on giving people a sense that by contributing to society they are contributing to something positive and worthwhile. I think that most people know that modern society is sick and destructive, and the only reason they're participating in it at all is because they're afraid of what will happen if they don't, or because they have convinced themselves that callous self-interest is actually worthwhile.
Has any approach not involving some variant of 'carrot and stick' (expanding the definition of 'stick' to include spiritual concepts such as Karma or damnation), ever successfully motivated a human society beyond the scale of a small village?
I'm not under the illusion that "free market capitalism" is noble and pure, but neither do I believe that the average human is either noble or pure enough for any objectively better system to function on a large scale.
I'm not persuaded that this global-elite is monolithic and acts in concerted fashion to advance monolithic interests.
I agree. In fact, I believe the evidence shows that there are several competing global elites, each attempting to assert their own vision of a global society on the world. And within those blocs, there are sub-blocs competing to assert their own "interpretation" of the vision, according to their particular twist on the orthodoxy.
The rest of your post is all interesting fodder for consideration. We could probably spend a whole week of evenings discussing this over a good bottle of absinthe.
But I would opine that the drill baby drill faction and the save the planet factions could very well be opposed in their attitudes about drilling... yet one or both still serve a common larger agenda.
Location: New Albany, Indiana (Greater Louisville)
11,974 posts, read 25,470,414 times
Reputation: 12187
I'm not much into conspiracy theories but I think that the lack of need for human labor is happening and going to accelerate. Job growth is barely above what it was in 2000 and it took until a year ago to get back to the level of employment in 2008.
Giving everyone an allowance isn't far fetched. How many people are receiving SS, food stamps, etc? A large number of people that would have been valuable labor in the past are no longer needed to maintain the same level of production.
Living in a perpetual New Deal type of situation where the gov't creates jobs that are fine but not needed is about the only option I can think of, and that's not ideal. If the trend of mass unemployment continues you will see major problems, nothing unravels society like numerous young men with no hope and nothing to do. If society is thrown into a depression that becomes a dark age we could cycle back through to employment for all but we'd lose our standard of living.
Has any approach not involving some variant of 'carrot and stick' (expanding the definition of 'stick' to include spiritual concepts such as Karma or damnation), ever successfully motivated a human society beyond the scale of a small village?
I'm not under the illusion that "free market capitalism" is noble and pure, but neither do I believe that the average human is either noble or pure enough for any objectively better system to function on a large scale.
Sure we've never had a society like that, but we've never been this technologically advanced either.
And we're not talking about a society that NEEDS to be motivated. There is nothing inherently noble about work-- it's necessary because people require (or simply want) goods and services. But if society doesn't need people to provide goods or services, why exactly do we need people to work? What advantage is there to watching people sink into poverty, despair, hunger, sickness and death for no reason other than they aren't working in a job that doesn't need to be done?
Obviously in a post-employment post-capitalist society you'll get people who choose to play video games all day or shoot heroin or whatever, but you will also get people who find more productive, meaningful ways to spend their time without worrying about whether or not what they're doing has any real monetary value.
Last edited by Spatula City; 06-06-2015 at 09:06 AM..
I'm not much into conspiracy theories but I think that the lack of need for human labor is happening and going to accelerate. Job growth is barely above what it was in 2000 and it took until a year ago to get back to the level of employment in 2008.
Giving everyone an allowance isn't far fetched. How many people are receiving SS, food stamps, etc? A large number of people that would have been valuable labor in the past are no longer needed to maintain the same level of production.
Living in a perpetual New Deal type of situation where the gov't creates jobs that are fine but not needed is about the only option I can think of, and that's not ideal. If the trend of mass unemployment continues you will see major problems, nothing unravels society like numerous young men with no hope and nothing to do. If society is thrown into a depression that becomes a dark age we could cycle back through to employment for all but we'd lose our standard of living.
Lack of "need"? Whose lack of need? Those who would automate everything to "streamline" profits??. Or those who allegedly don't need anything on the market not supplied by some big multi-national corporation using automated or slave labor? Or the "needs" of corrupt officials who offshore jobs in exchange for handsome bribes and kickbacks from foreign governments and powerbrokers?
The question certainly isn't about those who NEED the products of labor - food and housing and services - or need to feed their families and have the desired and skills to do so by working. We're being sold another bill of goods by the one percenters who want to tailor the world to their requirements. Economics today is the mystery religion of the world, an opiate of the masses as surely as religion was an opiate in days gone buy.
As an addendum to this plan, I would set up a mandatory Prisoner Clean-up Work Force in response to every natural or man-made disaster (hurricanes, floods, oil spills, transport accidents, and the like). Again, if the government could be trusted (stop laughing) to set this up just short of a totalitarian state, we'd save millions on one tornado clean-up alone. The rule: You go to prison, you work, and this is your job description.
County jail inmates have typically been used for disaster clean up, so this isn't anything new. But you are talking about some massive nationwide inmate labor force and that won't happen, you would have to build new facilities outside of the prison gates because deployment from a secure facility would take too long, most prison inmates would pose an escape risk or they are dangerous & the training period would probably exclude any inmates with a release date within the next year or so. The costs would be higher than employing civilians to do the same work. California already has inmate firefighters, but they can't really expand the program because you can't send inmates out to fight fires in handcuffs and leg irons and there aren't enough inmates who meet the criteria of low escape risk, no sex offense or violent crime history available to staff more fire camps let alone a clean-up work force.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
A commune works only so long as society is small enough that everybody is on a first name basis with their peers.
