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unfortunately this article ignored around the elephant in the room: one of the two dominant political parties has an entire platform devoted to stopping institi
by cryoshon 6y ago
unfortunately this article ignored around the elephant in the room: one of the two dominant political parties has an entire platform devoted to stopping institions from expanding while also eating away at the existing capabilities of those institutions. they pursue this platform relentlessly, and have done so for roughly the last 40 years.
faced with staunch refusals to consider any type of revolutionary building at the institutional level, would-be builders reduced their hopes to incremental changes, bringing us to the current state of affairs.
after enormous legislative efforts, incremental and generally insufficient changes are made to support the strength of US institutions. then, as part of the dealmaking necessary to make any changes whatsoever, other institutions are degraded incrementally in trade. the system of the country's institutions never becomes stronger in terms of its total sum of capabilities, it only reshuffles them.
imagine trying to build a house when half of your building team never lets you purchase any new materials, only permitting you the use of bricks that are already built into the house. you have to remove a brick from the foundation to place it on the top of a half-constructed wall. that's the situation the US is in. it's untenable.
there isn't going to be a tidy legislative solution to this kind of intractability anytime soon because the people with the most money prefer the current situation and fund politicians accordingly.
lest you think that the point of my comment is to blame republicans or democrats, let me tell you that it isn't. my point is that america cannot build because it cannot accept that building requires spending, as spending would require contradicting the will of the political donor class. we needed to get money out of politics back when occupy wall street was calling for it. the next best time is now.
in a nutshell, the rich need to do their part to contribute to society and accept that their influence must be curbed if the country is to flourish once again. as we know, there's no chance of them doing this of their own accord. i'll leave the details of how we can get them on board with rebuilding the country to the imagination of the reader.
- apsec112 6y agoThe article discusses projects that fail despite large budgets. Eg. "Marc Dunkelman spent years cataloging the many failures to revamp Penn Station, a number of which came complete with hefty doses of federal funding. Each time, the story was the same: Plenty of people who wanted to build, and plenty of money with which to build, but too many people with vetoes who simply didn’t want the building to happen."
- pas 6y agoBut that's not actually true. That hefty sum was nowhere near sufficient! Sure, it was hefty, but the parties involved were not ready to do real serious work. NYC could have used eminent domain, and yes that would have likely gone to the courts, but that is how it is supposed to work. Or they could have bought the thing, but that was too much money again!
- secstate 6y agoIn a strange way your statement "accept that their influence must be curbed ..." sounded an awful lot like how pro athletes don't really get a choice about being role models for young kids. The difference in the two groups is the affluent can pretty effectively build hedges (literal and figurative) to keep prying eyes off what they're actually doing, while pro athletes by design are in the spotlight. I wonder what would happen if the affluent were compelled somehow to acknowledge just how much wealth they have and what they do with it. Maybe this already happens via tax returns but most people don't know where to look? In any case, as you've stated, if capitalism has taught us anything, "morality" or "should" have zero effect on actual societal behavior. There must be a forcing function where the benefits of a particular behavior are obvious and outweigh the negative.
- creddit 6y agoIf that elephant in the room were real, how would that model fit California?
- pas 6y agoThe ideology is well alive in California, even if there no-tax/NIMBY folks don't have to vote R to have their voices heard.