ajax18 wrote:You're ____ your pants over what these crazy "socialists" want: common programs other successful first world countries have.
Venezuela and Cuba used to be 2nd world countries. Socialism got them where they are today. I don't think the US will be a first world country for long if Bernie and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez get their way on welfare and immigration.
Here's my extended, high-rise, stop at each floor elevator pitch view on the way things are, why they are that way, and why the current divide between conservatives and liberals in the US is an instigated rivalry that serves to distract people from uniting who have more in common and outnumber the other side substantially. It's an American-centric view out of necessity for the space and time available. And mainly because that's whose participating here.
The US came out of WWII with the most powerful industry on the planet. It was largely untouched by the devastation of war, had ramped up to feed the war effort, and had experienced innovations that can only come from the urgency of war. This coincided with the transition of global power from the British to the US as what had been left of the British empire was largely dismantled over the next decade and the US capitalized on the war debt obligations. Plus the US successfully leveraged the weakness of Britain and the strength of the dollar at the Bretton Wood conference in 1944 to make the US the economic capital of the global economy. Reforms to labor, capital controls, and other lessons learned from the gilded age and resulting Great Depression all flowed into this position of strength to create a period of unequalled opportunity and economic increase for the average lower and middle class American.
It's important to stop here and acknowledge that the previous century was a watershed in human history. The advent of the industrial age changed the rate of growth exponentially. Our modern idea that GDP should naturally increase year to year, let alone quarter to quarter, is a reflection of how distant the past is from our way of life. It's estimated the rate of increase over the entirety of the middle ages was around 2% total. Not per year. Over centuries. The age of discovery brought an injection of opportunity for wealth but this wasn't a change in the day-to-day lives of the average Spaniard or Brit. It was an incentive to sign up for an incredibly dangerous job on the off chance one could end up with a share of the profits brought back if one survived.
This perspective is necessary to understand that when the industrial age led to fundamental social changes and wealth generation this wasn't a natural extension of human history. It was something new. And it included challenges that arose as nation-states were charged with governing over societies being tried by the explosion of both innovation and inequality this caused. So by the time the ink was drying on The Treaty of San Francisco that ended hostilities between the allies and the last remaining axis power the US was at an unprecedented point in human history in terms of industrial capacity, social order, and opportunity.
It's difficult to contextualize just how much more wealthy the average American became in the resulting two decades after WWII compared to previous generations or even the wealthiest of peoples in ancient times. Technology and economic growth was translating into a shift of the population from rural farmers to essentially landed gentlemen who could afford leisure and luxuries and have the time to enjoy them, too. Expectations that the future would be even better became the norm, and if you were born between the 1940s and into the 1970s you almost certainly have a strong sense of entitlement. That's conservative, progressive, libertarian, whathaveyou. That is the ocean we lived in and breathed.
But that couldn't last, not least because even our friends in the world were naturally agitating for a recalibration of the system. Some of the more consequential results included the creation of the Eurobond and off-shore tax havens led by London and German financiers who were seeking means to get around the rules established at Bretton Wood intended to control capital and prevent the kinds of massive capital inflations that collapsed the gilded age into depression. The buyer bond, not backed by US Gold, coupled with small nations seeking ways to attract money with limited access to resources following Swiss lead benefited by American legal expertise in writing tax and identify protection laws, became a tipping point in creating what is now a massive black hole sucking wealth out of the global economy and into what may be seen as The Upside-Down of the economic world to use a Stranger Things analogy. Money sucked into this Upside-Down economy stops circulating in the broader global economy, resulting in fewer people benefiting from the multipliers that usually accompanied GDP growth. During the post-war period into the '70s the health of the US economy and that of the majority of the S&P 500 was coupled together. Strong economic conditions in the US meant the average person had buying power and the company had access to more customers creating a mutual dependency of sorts. Henry Ford foreshadowed this a generation earlier in paying his workers $5/hr with the recognition they would be able to buy his cars with that kind of standard of living.
It's been estimated around 30% of global wealth has now been sucked into The Upside-Down. That's hard to quantify for all the reasons that allow it to exist. But even if high, that should offend just about everyone with how obscene that is and the consequences of it. In the face of global catastrophe due to climate change, it should be criminal.
Now, the wealthiest of the world population were finding their ties to their nation of birth were less important than their connection to The Upside-Down whose hidden economy protected their wealth and created conditions that made it favorable to keep sucking more out of the normal, global economy and into The Upside-Down. From the '70s to today, the graphs don't lie. The real wealth increase of the average American basically hit a wall even as GDP growth continued to climb. We all continued to benefit from an increasing standard of living as PCs, iPhones, medicine, and technological advances like none before moved from science fiction fantasies to common place necessities. So we didn't see the change in the economic tide so much as sensed that for all the advancements we could see it seemed like we were not as well off as we ought to be. We stopped being able to sustain a household with just one income, and households increasingly needed both parents to work just to get by. Expenses that at one time seemed manageable if perhaps difficult can now break a family such as a major healthcare crisis or shift in employment skills. Whole regions could collapse economically as primary industry moved away from those that had once made a middle-class existence possible.
And this is where globalization comes in. As noted above the middle class of America is being drained by an unseen, unrecognized vampire in the global uber-wealthy. They're even more vampiric when it comes to sucking the wealth out of developing countries susceptible to corruption and instability. It's estimated Russian oligarchs control more than 50% of Russia's wealth. This wasn't due to Putin. It was due to the West encouraging Yeltsin to sell Russian resources that would picked up by wealthy, corrupt individuals and exploited.
This brings up another point. The United States was protectionist during our period of industrial expansion. Land was portioned out in ways that allowed individuals with no means but a willingness to work and take risks to become landed rather than simply put up on the market to be bought by whomever commanded the best price. The railroads and subsequent expansion that connected the east and west were a controlled experience that, while uneven, still included provisions that prevented simple oligarch takeover of America's wealth. Our closest allies and other successful industrialized nations followed similar paths. At it's birth, Germany under Bismarck was not a free market but one where German industry was nationalized and explicitly focused on overtaking the British rather than exposed to being bought out by whomever showed up with a big enough check. Following the resulting wars that arose from the challenge of an ascendant Germany, the German industrial miracle, along with Japans, was aided by the US become a consumer of their growing industrial might as the US ensured nations allied to itself and against the Soviets could find a market for their supposedly free-market produced goods. But the results of espousing market-driven national industrialization without protection for the broad swath of society can be seen in our backyard here on the western hemisphere and in the middle east. Nations encouraged to sell their resources to the highest bidder and capitalize industries became corrupted banana republics ravaged by inequality and repeated coups. Since this didn't really matter much to the US as long as we could keep the Soviets out, we encouraged such inequality. By ignoring our own past and the role protectionism played, we could look at others failures and chalk them up to flaws in their society or natures. It's easy to imagine we are exceptional because we were industrious and free, and others are less exceptional so they must be less industrious and love the boot on their neck. But a simple survey of the path to industrialization tells a simple tale: Left unprotected by a government that is concerned with the well being of the citizenry, free markets lead to authoritarianism. Otherwise, a few with the most will end up with the means to make more while everyone else is left out. And then it will just keep getting worse.
So, here we are today arguing about capitalism v. socialism like they are sports teams or religions and we are zealots pledged to their cause.
But why? Capitalism is exceptional for producing certain desirable outcomes. Decentralization and competition lead to innovation in ways central control simply never can. During WWII, the US and Britain, the most capitalistic nations in the fight, were undeniably more agile, innovative, and able to adapt to win the war. Germany's innovation came from state-driven will for experimentation and a willingness to support such. But once war broke out, the grip of the Nazi leadership and their inability to relax executive control failed them both in terms of responding to the demands of the war and in leading to internal resistance and resentments. The Russians threw their masses into the war machine to be ground to hamburger and probably broke Germany's back through attrition but it wasn't due to Russian innovation. Stalin's was perhaps the least agile regime in the war.
But capitalism is like biological evolution. It's engine is death. Innovation and risk taking get rewarded precisely because success is built on beating others out. Like species finding ways to outcompete other species who then succumb and go extinct, capitalism creates losers, and lots of them, in encouraging eventual winners to take risks and make money. And it's merciless in seeing previous winners overtaken and put down by even better ideas that arise and outcompete the old ways.
Capitalism is good for innovation. It's good for society to find solutions to problems or create problems for solutions that generate wealth. And if life were always an even playing field, it would probably work as a meritocratic means of ensuring the most able are likely to be justly rewarded while elevating society on the backs of those innovations such that everyone ends up better off because of it.
But life isn't an even playing field. Again, as in biological evolution, once an organism has control of a niche it's not easy to displace it. Human beings would never have evolved from early primates, because there would never have been early primates, had an asteroid not killed off the dinosaurs and created conditions for mammals to move into the niche left behind. Similarly, people with wealth and advantage use that wealth and advantage to keep it and ensure their offspring benefit from it. That's not about capitalism or socialism or any other -ism. It's human nature. And it usually results in class structure forming and becoming rigidly entrenched as class mobility is reduced or even eliminated in the process.
This is were the economic version of The Upside-Down comes back into the picture. We have an entrenching, wealth-accumulating elite with diminished ties to any particular national identify that for all intents and purposes should be recognized by most in the US as working against the average American's ability be equitably compensated for their intelligence and work, and participate in the benefits of growing economic wealth. Democrat or Republican, most voters in either party are not living in the economic Upside-Down. But for different reasons, members of both parties have taken up political arms against those on their side of the economy that results in both protecting the Upside-Down economy.
Republicans have long been co-opted deliberately through cultural war issues and the mind-trick of slave morality. The average conservative voter is a net loser in the economy but the elite members of their political class, who are fully aware of their own disparity in economic conditions and allegiance to the Upside-Down over the US, have convinced them that any attempt to reverse the vacuum and stop the suction of wealth out into the Upside-Down is an act of a totalitarian state who would take away freedom for the sake of indulging the laziness and lack of ability of those voting for such change. Seem familiar? It's the justification for why free markets failed developing nations when protections for the people of those nations was shoved aside in the name of capitalism.
Democrats, at least since the 80s, are just as interested in protecting the Upside-Down economy. It's not a misstatement to say third way Democrats have no interest in upsetting the balance of the global engines that feed wealth off into The Upside-Down. They have different views about what government's responsibility is to the future and how society should be structured but at it's core, the mainstream central Democrat party is just a different flavor of conservative that favors marriage equality and gun control over traditional marriage and the 2nd amendment. The two party system has been a devil's bargain for a while.
But what about progressives and liberals? When they advocate for socialism over capitalism, is there a meaningful different position there? I think we have to exclude Elizabeth Warren here for a moment, because in reality she is the one person in the context for President who claims to be a progressive who may genuinely be seeking ways to address the problem because she is one of the people who is shining a light on The Upside-Down and fighting it. It's not by accident that Trump and co. hate her and smear her at every turn. And it isn't by accident that most libertarians find her to be one of the more distasteful alternatives to Trump.
So, generically, the relationship between current liberal politics and globalized wealth is a hodge-podge of ideas aimed at symptoms. Globalization is both enemy and friend of the progressive movement which is confused. On one hand, progressives are protectionist and favor the kinds of protectionist actions Trump is engaging in when the person leading them isn't named Donald Trump. On the other hand, progressives tend to broadly support the economic advancement of lower classes around the globe and have affinity for their arrival at the table. Those aren't compatible views. Pluralities of culture and views are celebrated by what is becoming the current form of progressivism while demanding that they keep themselves pure from appropriation or blending. Innovation is given lip-service while the mechanisms for creating it are stifled. Problems are given the Field of Dreams treatment (if you build it, they will come) that suggests a lack of understanding of how things actually work or how consequences tend to follow actions that need considered much more carefully. In short, most progressive views presented in forums in the US come across as something dreamed up in a dorm room while high after a political science lecture. One hears about broad brushstroke ideas all funded by taxing the rich or corporations, but does little to present real understanding that the rules and national loyalties of the wealthy elite doing play by the same rules.
