4 ms·

> please tell me where you live so I can move there too. "The state", in most of human history, is woefully inept at making good, centralized decisions Germany

• spyckie2 6y ago
  Hard to comment on societies I don't know well. Instead I'd like to offer this explanation of my point of view: There are two competing ideas of governance. One is the umbrella (ie. Godfather) and one is the public servant / slave (ie. Jesus). - The godfather creates an empire and everyone who lives under him lives really, really well. - The public servant is an invisible figure that solves all the problems of its people and serves the people, meeting their needs. The US has most likely lived under a godfather system for the last 70 or so years, after WW2. Like it or not, our billionaires have created empires (their companies) and we live really well because of them. If the people of the US want to continue in their standard of living, they need to keep propping up the billionaires' empires because it's those empires that create the umbrella for the high standard of living we have. This does turn the US economy into... either you serve in the empires and live well, or you live poorly not enjoying the empire's provisions. So you have a dual economy - those in the US who are running the empire's money printing machines, and those who can't help those companies print money. And the dual economy has two results -> really well off people, institutions, and society, and poor people. The poor people are actually rich compared to the rest of the world, but are poor because the rich economy has inflated the prices and expectation for a normal standard of living for those poor people, and they are getting squeezed by both income and cost of living. Both capitalism and socialism alludes to this kind of situation, with differing opinions of what to do about it. Capitalism says we should use godfathers to make everyone live well. Prop up the godfathers enough and everyone can live better off than they used to (very key point is relative to the past). Socialism says no we need to move towards the public servant model to make everyone live well. Remove all the umbrellas and replace them with servitude and everyone can live in an ideal and fair society (also a key point, standard of living is not relative to the past, it's relative to the ideal). In capitalism moral judgment is based on if you live better than you used to. If you want to see where we started from, just watch BBC's planet earth - you'll see starving lions with rib bones showing, trying to catch gazelle in scorching heat in Africa in order to eat, since they haven't eaten in weeks. You'll see eagles and dozens of birds fighting over dead carcasses that are rotting. From a capitalist point of view, going from having to hunt for your next meal 10,000 years ago to robust supply chains for groceries and upgrading your iphone every year for practically everyone in the world is what they consider moral accomplishment. In socialism, moral judgment is based on if you live in society as close to the ideal of fairness that it can be. It looks at the relativeness of the current structure of society instead of the relativeness of standard of living improvements over time. If rich people are enjoying more things than poor people right now, that's considered immoral. If everyone has the opportunity and privilege to live a decently comfortable life, that is moral. The US is very capitalist in mindset. Keep in mind that in capitalism, companies also help those not within the company by creating better quality goods for consumers (everyone else), so the more empires grow, the cheaper/better the consumer goods are, and the better quality of life is for everyone, not just those who work for the empire. The US is so capitalist that it cannot imagine a world where standard of living and company growth stagnates. That's how dependent the US is on empires and on capitalism. In some ways, if you accept the capitalist moral judgment as a good moral judgment, the US is trying very hard to be moral even when it's practically impossible to do so! But then again, tell US citizens that their standard of living is going to go down - that they will not get everything at the quality that they expect, that their income is going to shrink, that their livelihood will take a slight hit - and that's too much to bear for the US population's ego because we've never had to tighten our belts in the history of the US for that past 70 years. But that's exactly what needs to happen for: 1) healthcare costs to come down (doctors and hospitals need to earn a lot less, like maybe 50-60% less) 2) income inequality to stabilize (basically 10% wealth transfer for GDP every year) 3) climate change to be mitigated (reduce carbon emissions which is basically shrink GDP by 1-2%) 4) housing prices need to go down (basically tell everyone that their primary asset needs to depreciate by 30-50% or even more) So yeah we live and die by the godfathers and their empires - that's the way the US is. And it really doesn't matter who is in the governance seat - neither rich people nor a strong state will do a good job making policy to cause the above to occur - you first have to change the willingness of the American people to willingly accept systematized and distributed personal loss. To be fair to Americans, social fairness is growing on the importance scale - but you have to tailor the changes in a way that aligns with existing US values and behaviors. You can't just say "oh, implement the way the Chinese/Germans run their government in the US", it's just too foreign to get any traction or pragmatic action (which is what Frankfurt school eschews, right?). Implementing policies where rich people keep their empires and wealth but instead are forced to use their empires to not keep printing money but to solve other problems - that's very American sounding to me. No one is saying that Bill Gates is a beloved figure btw; we are saying that he's effective at investing into getting rid of malaria though. Same with Elon musk, he ain't no saint but he can sure get us to the moon. He might also get us to clean and renewable energy if he put his mind to it, you never know. A lot of my inspiration for my thoughts on these issues comes from the waitbutwhy blog. The whole series on the story of us is fascinating, but especially chapter 4 talks about the American view of consumer capitalism which I recommend to read. https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/09/enlightenment-kids.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/09/enlightenment-kids.html
  • agent008t 6y ago
    I would've thought that government as a servant is prevalent under capitalism (the government is supposed to only provide services in the forms of courts, policing, defense, some infrastructure, some schooling). Whereas under socialism the government is like a godfather and is supposed to take care of you from cradle to grave, giving you tasks to do, providing you with entertainment, not asking you but telling you what to do and how to live, with an implicit guarantee that it would give everyone a decent life. Companies are not empires - they are just free people associating with each other on their own terms to create something.
    • akuji1993 6y ago
      You mistake socialism with authoritarian socialism. Which is one form of it and that can be on a scale, too. Socialism does not inherently forbid the use of a free market, just as capitalism doesn't mean there is a free market available. Those things are two different characteristics of an economic system.
      • agent008t 6y ago
        The socialism you speak of still involves the government taking from some and giving to others, and many people depending on the government to provide them with a decent life. The government is certainly seen as a "godfather", a source of livelihood, rather than as a public servant - a mere provider of certain services.
        • akuji1993 6y ago
          I'll agree to that. My issue is with this: > telling you what to do and how to live, with an implicit guarantee that it would give everyone a decent life. Why should I need to tell you what to do and how to live? There's gonna be things everyone will have to do from time to time (like cleaning streets, trash drives, maybe canal work, but most of those you can address by making the reward for doing such jobs higher than the average desk job), but other than that, you will have to work less and have more free time in which you will be free to do whatever you want. I'd argue that our current system forces you way more to do certain things than a socialist system would. If you are poor, you need to work service jobs or hard manual labor, otherwise you die. The system literally forces you to work, otherwise you will not be caught by any social safety net. That's why leftists tend to talk about "wage slaves", because at the end of the day, you can either become homeless and sick, or work.