Who fights what exactly? I'm not disagreeing I'm trying to understand.
And are elites just one monolith? I don't think that's how it is. I think every group in society has its cool people and its narrow-minded, greedy cretins. I doubt that there's a single entity called the elite that acts in concert after the annual meeting.
I think you are pretending to be obtuse. Wealthy people can afford to lobby congress, poor people cannot. Congress (has a whole) rarely does squat unless they are paid to do so. Most, if not all lobbying is controlled by wealthy people. Not all wealthy people control lobbying efforts.
Therefore, when 90% of the workforce is not needed, people who can afford to lobby congress (wealthy) will assuredly continue to lobby congress to ensure that the laws to deal with that problem don't affect their interests negatively. Paying what is essentially social security for everyone isn't going to be cheap. Paying 150 million people (approx workforce) $1000 a month would cost $1,800,000,000,000 a year, and that probably won't be enough.
This is not limited to the GOP and there is a ton of historical evidence of this. The middle class has been stagnant since Reagan. Globalization, trade agreements, ignoring the minimum wage limits, increasing visa limits, not prosecuting employers who use illegal labor, weakening of unions, not allowing the government to bargain on drugs they purchase through tax dollars, not allowing people to buy drugs from other countries, extending copyright monopoly durations, etc. None of those things help the middle class, they only help the corporations and people who lobbied congress.
Here is a list of the top 20 lobbying groups / people. I cannot see of any (except the AARP) that has citizens interest's in mind when they lobby. I certainly don't see any who would lobby to increase their taxes to support a living wage. These organizations are all controlled by wealthy people.
I wasn't trying to be obtuse. I fully acknowledge that greed is one of the forces ripping the society to shreds. However, people act in what they misperceive to be their best interests all the time. If your scenario comes to pass, then it will be flatly impossible to have anything close to a stable society. The rich do not become rich and stay rich in a vacuum. Maybe some of them think they didn't act on a platform or that they don't need society but if things start to fall apart and the safety net goes from frayed to ripped, the situation can go from bad to worse very fast and keep going.
These lobbyists you speak of and those who fund them can be dethroned in the next wave of populism to hit. The next wave might come from the left, might come from the right, or might just hit as a nihilistic spasm.
The order that you describe above is there based on an illusion.
I'm not trying to make some mystical claim. Pull a bill from your wallet. Try to eat it. What's it worth? It's worth money because of a tacit agreement on its value. There's no inherent value in that $5.
Go to the campus of a University. Why is that place University and not the park down the block? Because we've agreed and yes made laws to protect that designation and the professors and students show up at one and not the other but it's not objective reality woven into the fabric of the universe.
There's a lot of assumptions and agreements in almost everything that's part of civilization, including the details of the order that you described above.
That you will always have electricity, water, and enough to eat are also not written in stone either. Nobody who really understood some history, I mean feels it beyond mere abstraction, would say a destabilizing word in public or try to stir anyone else to act against stability. This person would have a broader understanding of their own interests. They would never advocate for authoritarianism as they'd grok Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, etc., etc.
I am not saying that it's even close to guaranteed that civilization will pull off survival nor do I have any clue how fast we are sliding and how much acceleration is to come and when. Nobody does. But I think it would be foolish for smart people to not consider this with an open mind.
To act in time I think will require some persuasion because if this idea is forced to wait until it can sell itself, then conditions will have deteriorated to the point where even those deep in denial will feel it. Reality can hit hard and fast.
I'm not saying you personally think things are just fine as I can't imagine anyone on HN who is not at least aware of the inevitability of a growing gap between those who need to work to survive and the number of jobs.
Further, I'm sure you're aware there are millions who are not going to be even close to ready to survive through their retirements.
If this all comes together with a malevolent or just clueless demagogue then things could get a whole lot worse, a whole lot faster.
I hope people are watching and learning and can put aside whatever ideology they currently cling to because those ideologies are just hindrances to clear thinking.
Great comments. I understand your comments on money, but I suspect other modern economies will fair the weather much better than the US. The US wealthy have diversified their wealth in physical assets, gold, foreign currencies, etc; things that have intrinsic value outside of the US. Not only that, they can continue to manufacture in foreign lands and sell to foreign markets. Capital is mobile, labor is not. What they almost certainly won't do is voluntarily give their wealth, without a fight, to combat mass unemployment. They will lobby hard against it (my original thought) or just leave the country.
The Great Depression saw a peak unemployment at around 25%. That took 10+ years, some arguably unconstitutional laws and a massive, global war effort (with destruction of many competing economies) to get out of. That was in a time period when both the political parties actually wanted to solve the problem. In the worst case scenario, with near complete automation and offshore labor, you'll be looking at around 75-90% unemployment in the US in a fairly rapid time period (10-20 years?). We've never seen anything like it; not that quickly.
I'd like to think we would figure out how to adapt, but we've had a serious political discussion about climate change for going on 10 years now, and the US has barely come around to agreeing it exists and is man caused (and I'm being generous) let alone an actionable plan to retard it, let alone reverse it. This denial and inaction is caused by the very same forces that will cause inertia when figuring out how to combat a US economy that can't support a fraction of the workforce.
We recently had the worst financial crisis since the great depression. Who got bailed out and who didn't? I understand why we needed to bail out the banks, but about the only thing the average homeowner got was weak refinancing laws that were abused by the wealthy banks! Furthermore, we haven't taken any serious measures to prevent it from happening again. What measures we did manage to take (Dodd-Frank) are constantly being picked away by those same forces.
We've had middle class wage stagnation for going on 30 years now and the electorate keeps voting for people who do things to perpetuate and accelerate that stagnation (both parties), thanks in part to misinformation and secrecy funded by those same forces.
As far as political shakeups, Occupy Wall Street did nothing. The Tea Party was absorbed then gradually extinguished by the GOP. The most recent political shakeup the US electorate could come up with was electing Trump. I don't have high hopes about him solving our upcoming economic problems either.
What we've been through in the last 10 or so years isn't even the scary part if my dire prediction comes to fruition. I don't think our political system is healthy enough to deal with what might be coming.
PS: This was a lot longer winded than I anticipated, so apologies if it reads all over the place.
I think you've made some cogent points here. The '30s here were not deeply structural or were they? That is, during the Depression, there was always the potential to climb back closer to full employment. It was thought to be part of the business cycle.
If automation takes way more jobs than it creates, possibly a lot more jobs, then nothing will jump start economy into jobs creating machine even if with higher economic growth.
So there's no gaming the business cycle to kick job growth into gear, though.
Without UI or perhaps a better program that works on the same program, you're NOT keeping the dire wolf from showing up at your window to collect his due. The '30s came close to that condition.
So angry tea partiers were not starving, the protesters on the left aren't starving. This Trumpian wave of populism isn't the worst case. The worst case is a Stalin, a Hitler or some of the sort of malevolence we don't have the imagination to understand due to its depravity. Imagine the difference between well-fed activist headed to the pub after a protest vs. millions of displaced with no hope and nothing to lose. I
I look at what I've written and I can tell I'm losing some coherence due to fatigue as the night wears on so hope it still came through what I was trying to say here. Sadly, because I don't stop by HN enough I might have to sign off soon but maybe I'll stay only for while surfing to see what emerges as I've personally found this discussion great. And other than maybe some minor flair ups of which I'm guilty of as much or more than average, I feel this HN community is pretty damn solid. Nobody actively tried to make look stupid or applied ad hominem attacks, it's an earnestness here that I admire Earnest gets worthwhile work done so keep it up.
>The '30s here were not deeply structural or were they? That is, during the Depression, there was always the potential to climb back closer to full employment.
Yes and no, I mean knowing the outcome certainly makes it seem that way. We certainly didn't have the economic knowledge we do today. 10 years of working at the problem had modest results and then a second recession occurred. The war spending was really what got us out of it. We supplied, at a nice profit, war material to England and France for two years before we got involved.
Back then, they (Hoover admin) believed the economy would take care of itself and did nothing (sound familiar?) Finally, Hoover (who was considered a brilliant businessman at the time) decided to enact a protectionist import tariff on Canada which was met with a retaliatory tariff on our goods and that was akin to throwing gas on the fire. A funny anecdote: Congress didn't do much about the dust bowl in Texas/Oklahoma until a 10,000 foot dust cloud was blown all the way from Texas/Oklahoma region, across half the continent, settling in Washington DC.
>Imagine the difference between well-fed activist headed to the pub after a protest vs. millions of displaced with no hope and nothing to lose.
Yes, I envision this as well, and on a massive scale. With the current militarization of the police in even the smallest towns, I fear, based on history, the local and state government would crack down hard on the protesting, a la Chicago riots in 1968 or the union busting in the early 1900s. Based on how authoritarian and stubborn the US government has become, it won't be long before they get involved and throw what remaining constitutional protections we have out the window. This could go on for years. Propagandists will continue to pit poor against poor along racial lines as they have been since after Bacon's rebellion and as they do today. Violence will begat violence and it might come closer to a 1930s Soviet landscape than we care to imagine as our government will see the protesters as "threats to democracy," and the "anarchists" moniker of the 1900s will come back and need to "be dealt with harshly." It will look foreign where you have the wealth class, the political / enforcement class, and everyone else. Only the last class will be the vast majority of the population, and as you said, starving. Not only starving, but oppressed, harassed and imprisoned. I don't trust our current government culture to handle this gracefully or intelligently. The biggest difference between now and the 1930s is that in the 1930s, the population trusted the government to act in their (citizen's) best interests, to their best ability. I don't think we're anywhere near that today.
As an aside, the Civil War had the benefit of a country versus a country; blue uniforms vs. grey uniforms. With this, if it comes to that, it would devolve into gurilla uprisings, not unlike the Arab Spring with the outcome of either side winning looking pretty ugly. I saw a photo that hit me like a brick. During the protests in Oakland, I believe, a young protester was wearing an Arab head scarf fashioned into mask like you would see in an ISIS video (Shemagh). I hope that wasn't a foreshadow of things to come.
>Nobody actively tried to make look stupid or applied ad hominem attacks, it's an earnestness here that I admire Earnest gets worthwhile work done so keep it up.
Yes, I really enjoy a good, thoughtful, intellectual discussion on the internet. This was the best discussion I've had in a while. I prefer discussing via typing rather than speaking, because I have time to research my own assertions as well as other's. HN is truly a pearl in a sea of mud.
It is a Pearl. I'm going to come back to this thread to read your comment and others I've missed later on as apparently there's more to life than HN.
Is this community kept civil exclusively by users up and down voting posts or are there moderators, too? Regardless, if you value civility you get civility.
I feel gratitude toward those who have built the culture here. Thank you.
I came back and read this. It sounds to me like your a pessimist. I can't say I blame you. I'm a natural optimist who's optimism has been strained to the limit. Do you see some paths that lead to reasonably good outcomes and stability?
Also, what puzzles me about for example those preaching hatred and stirring people up, is what it is that they want? Are they nihilists who just want to see everything in flames even if they burn too? Do they think they're somehow immune? Are they so blinded by ideology they actually think things will go the way their ideology says it will if only x, y, and z?
How could any human being, other than a sociopath or someone completely blinded by their ideology, possibly subscribe to authoritarianism of any kind? We now have access to all the information we need to find out the outcomes. Do they not at least attempt to grok Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot, Mao, Idi Amin, Kim Il Sung, et al? If it's ideology-induced blindness then there's hope.
If it's malevolent nihilism as then there will be no redemption.
To ideologues who want to dismantle the state, are you not familiar with the outcomes when states fail? Or do you think that we can't fail as bad or worse than other failed states such as Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Yemen? Do you think you are immune from violent death, disease, famine?
If the United States fails, we may well eat it more thoroughly in the end as there's no aid from governments or non-governmental organizations to even attempt to buffer us from failure.
We will, whether it's through concerted effort or no effort at all, take everyone down with us who thought their geopolitical position or other interest would benefit from hobbling us.
Do you think that all ideologies are wrong or just all ideologies are wrong except yours? Do you think you or anybody else really has the truth? How did you get your ideology and from whom? Why do you need it?
I feel hope when I talk to people who are free from the grip of ideology, who don't let others manipulate their thoughts and emotions. It's not the only thing that needs to happen but the more people who are free from the bullshit the better.
