Quote:
Originally Posted by BentBow
If you are free thinking and able to climb well, that rope allows you to climb to the top with innovation, new ideas, independence.
If you are a Democrat. It always turns into a leash and eventually a noose.
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As a "lower-case 'l' libertarian" -- one whose roots go all the way back to the movement's beginnings in the late Sixties -- I have mixed emotions on this subject.
Dreams of a "society without coercion" aside, life in a fragile, constantly-changing economy mandates a basic "safety net", a concept not that different from protection from the threats of natural disaster; the threat of "enemies - both domestic and foreign" is becoming somewhat harder to define, and the means to counter it not found in the "weapons systems" and other high-tech toys admired and promoted by the Defense Establishment.
And that "safety net" itself is prone to exploitation -- mostly because while the emerging "post-industrial" economy offers plenty of jobs, most of those jobs involve activities from which a generation of sheltered Snowflakes would run away screaming. And the sluffing off of those tasks onto the shoulders of immigrants from a much-different (and sometimes hostile) culture provides its own unique perils.
So how do we adjust an emerging scenario in which skills "grow old fast"? -- in which recent graduates face intense pressures in the "new workplace" on penalty of either being forced (at considerable expense and commitment of time) to re-invent themselves on a regular basis, or to drift from one indistinguishable "McJob" to the next? Most of us like, and want to work, but the de-industrialized workplace is a very predatory environment -- further corrupted by the effects of crony, rather than honest capitalism, as opposed a playing field with well-defined set of rules.
The true threat to the continued growth of an open market-driven economy is still limited to a relative few. but that threat is growing -- due not so much to a skewed supply of wealth (much of which is illusory) which needs "redistribution", but because the toothless and overly-sensitized mature of the contemporary workplace convinces many of us that we have "no skin in the game" (And both major parties have no interest in reforming that scenario - only in exploiting it.)
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