[flagged]
Life During Class Wartime
41–50 of 263 posts
Re: Life During Class Wartime
#42Increased taxation would be defensible if it was paired with spending reform. Increasing the tax to just inflate a bureaucracy helps nobody. Increasing the tax and then directly paying people, with no PMC in the middle, seems win-win-win.
Ideally you'd spend the taxes on things that help people, but I would argue that even simply destroying the taxed wealth would be an improvement over what we have now, if only in that it would counter wealth/power disparity and enable democracy to work better. Allowing a subset of the population to accumulate power divorces their interests from the majority and represents the biggest threat to modern society.
It would be a huge waste though. We should probably spend it on food, education, and healthcare instead.
Re: Life During Class Wartime
#43[flagged]
Re: Life During Class Wartime
#44Yeah I'm glad somebody's talking about it. Wealth inequality seems like it will be THE defining issue of our lives (accelerated drastically by AI). I think there are many practical ways to solve it, and would love to see more proposals out there. Instead I tend to see nihilism or division.
What are these practical ways to solve it? And who do you think will implement them? Especially when Billionaires control the opinions of a big chunk of the population.
You can read about the transition from the Gilded Age to The Progressive Era in US history for potential solutions. Anti-trust and political reform is a bit part. Political opinions were controlled undemocratically during that period as well through political machines. Direct election of senators, direct primaries, women’s suffrage were enacted to help with that.
Re: Life During Class Wartime
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We are currently killing millions of our own people. What do you mean?
Perhaps you haven't been paying attention to the skyrocketing prices of fuel, food, and healthcare... Or did you just think all those people just above the poverty line disappear when the livable income floor gets hydraulically jacked up?
I'm aware. What I don't see are the millions of dead bodies that hootz says are currently being produced.
Re: Life During Class Wartime
#46Increased taxation would be defensible if it was paired with spending reform. Increasing the tax to just inflate a bureaucracy helps nobody. Increasing the tax and then directly paying people, with no PMC in the middle, seems win-win-win.
> Increasing the tax to just inflate a bureaucracy helps nobody
Bureaucracy = jobs, at least. I'd rather that than having it concentrated at the top.
Re: Life During Class Wartime
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to condone the violence OP is calling for, but we have very recent examples of what happens when somebody does this. The factual answer to your question is: „for a limited time, rejections rates by health insurance companies plummets“
This doesn't appear to be true at all. Do you have a source?
I can’t be bothered to look one up to be honest. I’m not that invested in US internal politics.
But Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of reactions with citations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Brian_Thompson
Re: Life During Class Wartime
#48Yeah I'm glad somebody's talking about it. Wealth inequality seems like it will be THE defining issue of our lives (accelerated drastically by AI). I think there are many practical ways to solve it, and would love to see more proposals out there. Instead I tend to see nihilism or division.
Extreme power inequality seems to be the default state of human society. Power concentrates until it's maximally concentrated, then stays there. Power shakeups seem to usually replace one group of elites with another group of smaller or the same size. Exceptions to this rule come about for specific reasons. Before the industrial revolution, there just wasn't that much power to go around. Everyone was working their la…
Great works on this subject, to my mind refuting your nebulous thesis, include Debt by Graeber, Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow, and Mutual Aid by Kropotkin.
Re: Life During Class Wartime
#49Increased taxation would be defensible if it was paired with spending reform. Increasing the tax to just inflate a bureaucracy helps nobody. Increasing the tax and then directly paying people, with no PMC in the middle, seems win-win-win.
Ideally you'd spend the taxes on things that help people, but I would argue that even simply destroying the taxed wealth would be an improvement over what we have now, if only in that it would counter wealth/power disparity and enable democracy to work better. Allowing a subset of the population to accumulate power divorces their interests from the majority and represents the biggest threat to modern society. It woul…
> destroying the taxed wealth
Wealth is farms, factories, skills, etc. How would destroying all that improve anyone's life?
Wealth isn't money. It exists independent of any currency you can use to give it notional value.
Re: Life During Class Wartime
#50Do you really understand class war? Your suggestion is having the state legislate this away as if the state isn't fully compromised by the capitalist class? This is the main lesson of the 20th century that liberals refuse to accept; that the state is controlled by capitalist class interests. Capitalist democracy is a curated racket. And even if we were to force legislation exactly as described above it can't and hasn…
History shows that the "fundamental change to power relations" is just a shift from moneyed interests to political/bureaucratic interests. Which is worse because while moneyed interests have power money can buy, political/bureaucratic interests have the power of state coercion.
"They will go as far as to kill people for this" is rich coming from someone preaching Marxism, for which millions have been murdered.