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Life During Class Wartime

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Re: Life During Class Wartime

#61

Post by bryanrasmussen »

tardedmeme wrote: post #4
zug_zug wrote: post #3

Yeah 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…

generally the power shakeup that replaces an elite with another elite is one that replaces an old elite with a rising elite better able to take advantage of some economic conditions the old elite is ill-equipped to take advantage of

https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-new-exploiters-9d8a0684...

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#62

Post by lovich »

christkv wrote: post #53

In Europe governments make up such a big part of GDP now in some cases nearly half of it that it becomes silly to talk about the evil capitalist. We should be talking about the graft and poor spending of that money.

Well the article wasn’t speaking about Europe but Canada and America.

And if you read the article you will see his mention of the wealthy that are advocating for higher taxes/better wealth distribution and explicitly says that not all wealthy are The Enemy.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#63

Post by gazebo2 »

pitaj wrote: post #57
zug_zug wrote: post #3

Yeah 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.

My hot take is that wealth inequality is the least bad problem we could have, if it is even a problem at all. What people are actually experiencing is not wealth inequality, but cost disease. Vital things (housing, healthcare, education) are more expensive - and that's mostly the fault of state action.

But that state action is the direct result of wealth's influence over the state and how it operates

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#64

Post by sophacles »

Muromec wrote: post #28
nervysnail wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

... was an ideology that gave 200 million of people universal healthcare, universal childcare, public housing and increased luteracy rates but took away democracy and national self determination, unleashed genocide and allied with literal Hitler

Most ideologies are terrible in those regards. The various forms of democratic capitalism have been pretty big on genocide and oppression too. Most of them were were pretty unconcerned with Hitler until after the marxist-leninists were already fighting him.

Not sure what point you're trying to make.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#65

Post by lovich »

pitaj wrote: post #50
Atlas667 wrote: post #11

Do 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.

How is the government worse than the corporation or billionaire for coercion?

Libertarians always try to convince us that the corporate boot tastes so much better than the governmental one, but they both taste like leather to me and I at least have a say, however small, on the government.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#66

Post by gazebo2 »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #49
idle_zealot wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wealth is also money actually -- people don't contribute farms to politicians campaigns

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#69

Post by lovich »

pitaj wrote: post #57
zug_zug wrote: post #3

Yeah 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.

My hot take is that wealth inequality is the least bad problem we could have, if it is even a problem at all. What people are actually experiencing is not wealth inequality, but cost disease. Vital things (housing, healthcare, education) are more expensive - and that's mostly the fault of state action.

> if it is even a problem at all.

One of the pillars of capitalism is that the entire economy is more efficient when decision making power is dispersed as close as possible to the people making economic decisions aka what they buy.

When we have ended up in a situation where a handful of people are making all the economic decisions because they have all the money, there is no functional difference between that situation and a command economy.

If you’re a believer in capitalism as a tool to eliminate scarcity you should view the existence of billionaires(adjust for inflation) over the longer term as policy failures that are eroding capitalisms ability to create more and more.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#70

Post by inglor_cz »

gazebo2 wrote: post #63
pitaj wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hot take is that wealth inequality is the least bad problem we could have, if it is even a problem at all. What people are actually experiencing is not wealth inequality, but cost disease. Vital things (housing, healthcare, education) are more expensive - and that's mostly the fault of state action.

But that state action is the direct result of wealth's influence over the state and how it operates

Two of the three (housing and education) don't seem to be caused by that.

Neither restrictive zoning, nor the administrative bloat in academia that caused tuition to skyrocket, were lobbied into existence by people like Bezos and Musk. They are result of tireless lobbying of relatively unimportant people seeking their own little rent.

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