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I doubt any person in power would advocate such a radical shift that could possibly alter their favorable status quo. As the Citigroup papers says, the current
by consonants 13y ago
I doubt any person in power would advocate such a radical shift that could possibly alter their favorable status quo.
As the Citigroup papers says, the current political and social environment almost solely serves the the interests of wealthy, and for that they are elated. They fear that a social movement that shifts the focus of the national narrative towards any kind of reduction in inequality would drastically alter the ecosystem in which they are the apex predator. To extrapolate, if it becomes politically viable to advocate a basic income for the people, then the narrative has shifted towards reducing inequality and that is a direct threat to the plutonomy they enjoy. Why risk the narrative when you can already suck on the government teat through contracting, subsidies, and political donations? Shuffling wealth around introduces too much uncertainty.
- dnautics 13y agoIf you give government the control over everyone's pursestrings, then you are giving the opportunity or advantage to someone. Shuffling wealth around does introduce uncertainty - when it is the many-headed public that is doing the shuffling it via individual and group transactions, sometimes for-profit, sometimes charitably. When you are contracting out through a single entity (the government) that is when you create certainty that the already-privileged will find far easier to get an advantageous audience with and therefore, far easier to capture.
- loceng 13y agoWhy not shuffle and give advantage to the government? Make the someone being the collective people?
- dnautics 13y agoWe do this shuffling already, "in the name of the people". How's that working out? "By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become 'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat...Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." - John Maynard Keynes