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It's not about rich or poor. Any group, if you threaten their economic interests, will retaliate. Take for instance public sector unions: they have grown from

It's not about rich or poor. Any group, if you threaten their economic interests, will retaliate. Take for instance public sector unions: they have grown from strength to strength over the last 50 years, and today are owed trillions in pensions, from sweetheart collective bargaining agreements, that have massively increased their benefits, while degrading the quality of public services, like public education: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839935 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839... Public school teachers in New York state have a pension that averages $88K per year upon retirement, and it is almost impossible to fire them over the course of their career: https://www.the74million.org/article/investigation-nyc-tried-to-fire-154-teachers-for-incompetence-or-misconduct-75-were/ https://www.the74million.org/article/investigation-nyc-tried... If you were to eliminate the laws that force states into collective bargaining with their exclusive unions, without compensating them, you would get a socialist (Black Lives Matter / the 99%) revolution on your hands. If you were to institute a LVT without compensating the millions of people whose main source of wealth is property, you would get a fascist revolution on your hands. Conflicts are enormously costly. It is better to pay to avoid them where it can be morally justified. And conflicts can be preceded by decades long stalemates, where no reform happens. Reaching a settlement sooner can save trillions in cumulative efficiency gains from ridding the economic structure of rent-seeking. As for the moral justification, the Guardian in 1833 provided it: https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2011/may/07/newspapers-national-newspapers https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blo... >>"The guilt of slavery attaches far more to the nation which has introduced, legalized and supported it, than to the planters" Ironically, today it's the Guardian's journalists who extract economic rent, via laws that force their employer to limit the parties they negotiate with to members of their union, to the exclusion of all other workers. The Guardian's 1833 defense of punitive reformation would thus protect the staff of the Guardian in 2021 from a highly disruptive transformation of the legal framework. >>In any case the US made back a lot of the losses of the war during the period of reconstruction. The damage from the Civil War is still not fully repaired.

pydry 5y ago
It's kind of weird that you hold up unions as an example of a group who would go to war if their economic interests are threatened, yet they have not just been threatened they have had a scythe taken to them since the 1970s and yet here we are. No war. But you think that the fascists should have money thrown at them because they're more violent than the rest of us? I don't believe an LVT should be ramped from 0% to 100% immediately. Would boiling the frog be more effective and safer? Certainly. If a far right terrorist movement were to emerge as a result of a policy like this, should it be appeased? You may very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment. >The damage from the Civil War is still not fully repaired. After the civil war America rebuilt itself into the world's richest and most powerful country. Some people would count that as "doing ok". It could have very easily turned itself into yet another bloated oligarchy like Argentina rather than growing into the world's most powerful industrial superpower if existing economic relations were deliberately maintained.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  There has been no assault on unions.. in the private sector, they bankrupted every domestic industry where they predominated. That is what caused their membership rates to decline. In the one sector where expenses are socialized, and thus which doesn't go bankrupt easily, they have gotten increasingly powerful. Government social welfare spending has rapidly grown, at the behest of public sector unions who increasingly control the political system: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-longrun https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long... A couple anecdotes illuminates the kind of power these unions wield: New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/26/why-new-york-is-in-trouble--290304-public-employees-with-100000-paychecks-cost-taxpayers-38-billion/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/26/why... In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year. California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers. >>But you think that the fascists should have money thrown at them because they're more violent than the rest of us? They're not fascists. But many will join fascist movements, like the Jan 6th groups, if they see their economic interests threatened, just as many public sector union members will join insurrectionist socialist/communist movements, if their rent-seeking institutions are dismantled. >>After the civil war America rebuilt itself into the world's richest and most powerful country. The US was already on its way to becoming the richest and most powerful country in the world in the early 19th century. That outcome was predicted by British thinkers since long before the Civil War. The Civil War was massively destructive, both in terms of economic resources, and human lives - in killing 600,000 people, and later US economic growth was despite of it, not because of it.

pydry 5y ago

It's kind of weird that you hold up unions as an example of a group who would go to war if their economic interests are threatened, yet they have not just been threatened they have had a scythe taken to them since the 1970s and yet here we are. No war. But you think that the fascists should have money thrown at them because they're more violent than the rest of us? I don't believe an LVT should be ramped from 0% to 100% immediately. Would boiling the frog be more effective and safer? Certainly. If a far right terrorist movement were to emerge as a result of a policy like this, should it be appeased? You may very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment. >The damage from the Civil War is still not fully repaired. After the civil war America rebuilt itself into the world's richest and most powerful country. Some people would count that as "doing ok". It could have very easily turned itself into yet another bloated oligarchy like Argentina rather than growing into the world's most powerful industrial superpower if existing economic relations were deliberately maintained.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
There has been no assault on unions.. in the private sector, they bankrupted every domestic industry where they predominated. That is what caused their membership rates to decline. In the one sector where expenses are socialized, and thus which doesn't go bankrupt easily, they have gotten increasingly powerful. Government social welfare spending has rapidly grown, at the behest of public sector unions who increasingly control the political system: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-longrun https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long... A couple anecdotes illuminates the kind of power these unions wield: New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/26/why-new-york-is-in-trouble--290304-public-employees-with-100000-paychecks-cost-taxpayers-38-billion/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/26/why... In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year. California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers. >>But you think that the fascists should have money thrown at them because they're more violent than the rest of us? They're not fascists. But many will join fascist movements, like the Jan 6th groups, if they see their economic interests threatened, just as many public sector union members will join insurrectionist socialist/communist movements, if their rent-seeking institutions are dismantled. >>After the civil war America rebuilt itself into the world's richest and most powerful country. The US was already on its way to becoming the richest and most powerful country in the world in the early 19th century. That outcome was predicted by British thinkers since long before the Civil War. The Civil War was massively destructive, both in terms of economic resources, and human lives - in killing 600,000 people, and later US economic growth was despite of it, not because of it.