4 ms·

Basically: neoliberalism is shit and everyone hates it. People who are deeply invested in this ghastly status-quo quake at the prospect of the proles finally d

by s_kilk 10y ago

Basically: neoliberalism is shit and everyone hates it. People who are deeply invested in this ghastly status-quo quake at the prospect of the proles finally demanding a less insane mode of economy, hence all the blithering about populism.

erelde 10y ago
USA "proles" fell for populism and elected the worst neocapitalist team possible, against their own interests, that's what we're talking about when we talk about "populism". By and large people (demographically) who voted for the democrats won't be much affected by the GOP gov, but the people who voted for the GOP will be badly affected. If a mod comes here, I vote for closing this post, I feel it is very very prone to political flame wars.
- dukeluke 10y ago
  I agree this post is prone to a flame war, but it's also a really important conversation for people to have. Many people don't understand why the election went the way that it did. How can we discuss this important topic correctly?
- DarkKomunalec 10y ago
  Sharing your country and resources with immigrants is also against one's self-interest, but we don't label that as irrational.
  - lumberjack 10y ago
    How about your stop shitting on immigrants and blaming them for everything? It only fosters irrational hate and causes unnecessary violence. It's not like those immigrants are occupying good paying low skill jobs that could otherwise be done by Americans. They do fruit picking in California for below minimum wage. Immigration is used as a scapegoat. Look at Germany. They have the same policies. They have immigration. They have open borders and they have free trade policies and they fully embrace globalism. Yet Germany retained its high paying relatively low skill jobs and the US didn't. The reason is simply that the various CEOs in the respective countries decided on different business strategies. In the US it seems they decided to go with low cost manufacturing in China/Mexico.
    - DarkKomunalec 10y ago
      Immigration increases the supply of low-skilled labour, thus lowering wages. And since a good deal of the US economy is based on exporting, the increase in the demand for labour due to the presence of immigrants is smaller (i.e., they don't have to be in the US to buy iPhones and Snickers bars). Finally, people are naturally tribalistic - you can blame evolution for that one. Until we fix that, immigration will increase ethnic tensions, which serve as a distraction for corporations to use while they rob you. But I guess I'm just being irrational..
      - Sone7 10y ago
        It does seem a little bit irrational to state that immigration is being used by corps to distract us, while ignoring the positive aspects of it. Also, saying that people are naturally tribalistic, because of evolution, fails to take into account that we're not slaves to our impulses, and that evolution blatantly favours cooperation over competition.
        DarkKomunalec 10y ago
        Tribalism is as much about cooperation as about competition - help the virtuous Us to drive out the villainous Them. It makes it no less easy to abuse however, e.g. "Look at those no-good black welfare queens with their 12 kids paid for by good honest white people! Cut social spending!"
        candiodari 10y ago
        Some credit should be given to the war cry of the current (still pretty much current) regime : let's help the favored classes (I would say the weak, but lots of weak classes find themselves excluded) and everything will get better for everyone ! And then, for about 16 years, since the crisis of 2000 ... it didn't get better for everyone. Real income has been dropping since the 1980s, but it was almost steady until 1999. And then healthcare, fuel/energy and education really exploded. Of course this is the result of the crisis in 2008, which was of course not caused in 2008, but before then. Obama got elected on the same platform as Trump, really. He was going to change things. Hope and change. The famous blue and red posters, his own characteristic style, all very memorable and well executed. An abundance of hope, but I must say the change was found somewhat lacking. Despite a nobel peace prize, Guantanamo was not closed, and there was a massive 2008 crisis, rather than a recovery (yes Obama promised an economic recovery from the situation BEFORE the 2008 crisis, remember ? The Bush tax cuts were the big bogeyman at the time). Then the experience of the crisis came. Even if you weren't one of the people who kept the debt but lost their home, very few people did well during the crisis. Then there was the initial pullback, but aside from the 1% with lots of stocks nobody was really made whole. Then the FED "fixed" this. They came up with what's commonly known as the "PCE deflator" because of oil. You see, because of the huge fuel/energy price rise people were using much less energy, and as a result it shouldn't be counted in inflation (or else inflation would have been close to 10%). Likewise, people use less housing, same reasoning. That's great, but ... people still had less fuel/energy as a result, the banks just refused to count that as inflation. There's a famous Y Combinator article titled "There's a remarkable correlation between the quality of life and energy use". Likewise people have enjoyed less housing, all of which is not counted ... Despite this massive adjustment to favor economic indicators under Obama, his policies have not improved the situation of the average American. All together I would say that, on a large average, and without counting inflation, Americans have gotten back about half of what they lost in the 2008 crisis. Counting CPI inflation sadly I'd say it's more like 20%. And now they elect the other party. The response "They must be evil racists !" (because let's be honest, "tribalism" is no more than a euphemism) seems like it might be missing the point a bit, aside from being entirely unhelpful.
- gremlinsinc 10y ago
  Ben studebaker called the rise of Trump in his article which had a really broad overview of what neoliberalism is, and he basically postulated that it's on the way out and we can EITHER have Nationalism (Trump) or Egalitarianism (Bernie Sanders)... sadly for America, he was ABSOLUTELY right, but nationalism won out... But that might not hold true, as we can easily flip flop back and forth till one side shows true progress at fixing the shit wrong with America. https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2016/02/10/why-bernie-sanders-is-more-electable-than-people-think/ https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2016/02/10/why-bernie-sanders... That was written last February back when people actually thought it insane that Hillary Clinton could lose to Donald Trump -- doesn't sound so crazy now though.
TulliusCicero 10y ago
> neoliberalism is shit and everyone hates it. Is this similar to how democracy is the worst system of governance except for all the others? What's terrible about neoliberalism that a more populist route will fix without being worse in other ways?
- arethuza 10y ago
  I think the problem is that neoliberalism is an ideology and suffers the same problem as all other ideologies - their advocates only care about purism of concepts and not whether things work or don't work in the real world. e.g. I'm rather happy with our socialist NHS in the UK - I don't want socialism in many other areas but for health it seems to have made sense. I don't want an ideologue coming along and trying to dismantle it just because they disagree with the founding concepts rather than how it actually works.
- gremlinsinc 10y ago
  Neoliberalism, and for that matter democracy (our Republic actually, since USA isn't a democracy) WAS devised by the 'elite' class. -- Washington, Jefferson, et al were all the elites of their times, Jefferson was a very rich slave owner. The problem I think is we get tied to the 'historical' or national pride of the constitution when there's many flaws in the way our government was setup, and it was always a rigged game - rigged for those with money/economic sway. There has never been a gov't yet that really put the needs of it's poorest people at the forefront of the constitution. (Some european countries come close like Denmark) -- but only after recent changes in the past 100 years -- the problem is changing ANYTHING in a country as big as America with a political establishment that contols BOTH parties is nearly impossible. Should we blindly follow people who are rich enough to command others? Now that we have the internet/technology why can't we have where we vote on issues, or pick ANYBODY we admire and trust to vote for us? -- I don't want to vote on all tech stuff so I might delegate my vote to Bill Gates on issues tagged 'tech', environmental stuff I'd delegate to Bill Nye, etc.. They could vote or re-delegate their collective votes to someone else like Bernie Sanders, or John Mccain.

by s_kilk 10y ago

erelde 10y ago

USA "proles" fell for populism and elected the worst neocapitalist team possible, against their own interests, that's what we're talking about when we talk about "populism". By and large people (demographically) who voted for the democrats won't be much affected by the GOP gov, but the people who voted for the GOP will be badly affected. If a mod comes here, I vote for closing this post, I feel it is very very prone to political flame wars.

dukeluke 10y ago
I agree this post is prone to a flame war, but it's also a really important conversation for people to have. Many people don't understand why the election went the way that it did. How can we discuss this important topic correctly?
DarkKomunalec 10y ago
Sharing your country and resources with immigrants is also against one's self-interest, but we don't label that as irrational.
- lumberjack 10y ago
  How about your stop shitting on immigrants and blaming them for everything? It only fosters irrational hate and causes unnecessary violence. It's not like those immigrants are occupying good paying low skill jobs that could otherwise be done by Americans. They do fruit picking in California for below minimum wage. Immigration is used as a scapegoat. Look at Germany. They have the same policies. They have immigration. They have open borders and they have free trade policies and they fully embrace globalism. Yet Germany retained its high paying relatively low skill jobs and the US didn't. The reason is simply that the various CEOs in the respective countries decided on different business strategies. In the US it seems they decided to go with low cost manufacturing in China/Mexico.
  - DarkKomunalec 10y ago
    Immigration increases the supply of low-skilled labour, thus lowering wages. And since a good deal of the US economy is based on exporting, the increase in the demand for labour due to the presence of immigrants is smaller (i.e., they don't have to be in the US to buy iPhones and Snickers bars). Finally, people are naturally tribalistic - you can blame evolution for that one. Until we fix that, immigration will increase ethnic tensions, which serve as a distraction for corporations to use while they rob you. But I guess I'm just being irrational..
    - Sone7 10y ago
      It does seem a little bit irrational to state that immigration is being used by corps to distract us, while ignoring the positive aspects of it. Also, saying that people are naturally tribalistic, because of evolution, fails to take into account that we're not slaves to our impulses, and that evolution blatantly favours cooperation over competition.
      - DarkKomunalec 10y ago
        Tribalism is as much about cooperation as about competition - help the virtuous Us to drive out the villainous Them. It makes it no less easy to abuse however, e.g. "Look at those no-good black welfare queens with their 12 kids paid for by good honest white people! Cut social spending!"
        candiodari 10y ago
        Some credit should be given to the war cry of the current (still pretty much current) regime : let's help the favored classes (I would say the weak, but lots of weak classes find themselves excluded) and everything will get better for everyone ! And then, for about 16 years, since the crisis of 2000 ... it didn't get better for everyone. Real income has been dropping since the 1980s, but it was almost steady until 1999. And then healthcare, fuel/energy and education really exploded. Of course this is the result of the crisis in 2008, which was of course not caused in 2008, but before then. Obama got elected on the same platform as Trump, really. He was going to change things. Hope and change. The famous blue and red posters, his own characteristic style, all very memorable and well executed. An abundance of hope, but I must say the change was found somewhat lacking. Despite a nobel peace prize, Guantanamo was not closed, and there was a massive 2008 crisis, rather than a recovery (yes Obama promised an economic recovery from the situation BEFORE the 2008 crisis, remember ? The Bush tax cuts were the big bogeyman at the time). Then the experience of the crisis came. Even if you weren't one of the people who kept the debt but lost their home, very few people did well during the crisis. Then there was the initial pullback, but aside from the 1% with lots of stocks nobody was really made whole. Then the FED "fixed" this. They came up with what's commonly known as the "PCE deflator" because of oil. You see, because of the huge fuel/energy price rise people were using much less energy, and as a result it shouldn't be counted in inflation (or else inflation would have been close to 10%). Likewise, people use less housing, same reasoning. That's great, but ... people still had less fuel/energy as a result, the banks just refused to count that as inflation. There's a famous Y Combinator article titled "There's a remarkable correlation between the quality of life and energy use". Likewise people have enjoyed less housing, all of which is not counted ... Despite this massive adjustment to favor economic indicators under Obama, his policies have not improved the situation of the average American. All together I would say that, on a large average, and without counting inflation, Americans have gotten back about half of what they lost in the 2008 crisis. Counting CPI inflation sadly I'd say it's more like 20%. And now they elect the other party. The response "They must be evil racists !" (because let's be honest, "tribalism" is no more than a euphemism) seems like it might be missing the point a bit, aside from being entirely unhelpful.
gremlinsinc 10y ago
Ben studebaker called the rise of Trump in his article which had a really broad overview of what neoliberalism is, and he basically postulated that it's on the way out and we can EITHER have Nationalism (Trump) or Egalitarianism (Bernie Sanders)... sadly for America, he was ABSOLUTELY right, but nationalism won out... But that might not hold true, as we can easily flip flop back and forth till one side shows true progress at fixing the shit wrong with America. https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2016/02/10/why-bernie-sanders-is-more-electable-than-people-think/ https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2016/02/10/why-bernie-sanders... That was written last February back when people actually thought it insane that Hillary Clinton could lose to Donald Trump -- doesn't sound so crazy now though.

TulliusCicero 10y ago

> neoliberalism is shit and everyone hates it. Is this similar to how democracy is the worst system of governance except for all the others? What's terrible about neoliberalism that a more populist route will fix without being worse in other ways?

arethuza 10y ago
I think the problem is that neoliberalism is an ideology and suffers the same problem as all other ideologies - their advocates only care about purism of concepts and not whether things work or don't work in the real world. e.g. I'm rather happy with our socialist NHS in the UK - I don't want socialism in many other areas but for health it seems to have made sense. I don't want an ideologue coming along and trying to dismantle it just because they disagree with the founding concepts rather than how it actually works.
gremlinsinc 10y ago
Neoliberalism, and for that matter democracy (our Republic actually, since USA isn't a democracy) WAS devised by the 'elite' class. -- Washington, Jefferson, et al were all the elites of their times, Jefferson was a very rich slave owner. The problem I think is we get tied to the 'historical' or national pride of the constitution when there's many flaws in the way our government was setup, and it was always a rigged game - rigged for those with money/economic sway. There has never been a gov't yet that really put the needs of it's poorest people at the forefront of the constitution. (Some european countries come close like Denmark) -- but only after recent changes in the past 100 years -- the problem is changing ANYTHING in a country as big as America with a political establishment that contols BOTH parties is nearly impossible. Should we blindly follow people who are rich enough to command others? Now that we have the internet/technology why can't we have where we vote on issues, or pick ANYBODY we admire and trust to vote for us? -- I don't want to vote on all tech stuff so I might delegate my vote to Bill Gates on issues tagged 'tech', environmental stuff I'd delegate to Bill Nye, etc.. They could vote or re-delegate their collective votes to someone else like Bernie Sanders, or John Mccain.