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I think that's exactly what OP meant? While Trump's policies take the long term gerontocratic/anarcho-capitalist dynamics strangling of our society and crank them to 11, a lot of younger people ended up buying into his "burn it all down" messaging imagining it would result in some principled evenly-applied reform that might get the boot off their own necks. And that level of foolishness seems straight from the naive…
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You can read this exact criticism of democracy in „Athenaion Politeia“, (The Old Oligarch), 5th century BCE. There is nothing new under the sun. It always worked like this. Democracy is simply an incredibly destructive form of government.
To ignore scale differences here is to negate what could have been a great comment into a miss.
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Term limits are perhaps the dumbest idea that ever plagued democracy. The idea of mandatory firing your most qualified, experienced employees in an incredibly difficult job that can only be learned with on-the-job experience is literally insane. If not for term limits, the US would have had Obama in the presidency this entire time instead of the absolute garbage scraps that were left over when they fired the only per…
Term limits encourage the development of robust laws, systems and institutions which provide a far more stable basis for running a society than having power structures that rely on the brilliance of an individual or individuals. Without terms limits or the like (and there are countless examples not just in history but currently around the world), individuals in power are motivated mostly to preserve that power and ha…
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How else would you deal with people who are too old to do the job, and too senile to realize they can no longer perform and should abdicate? Because we have politicians who can barely walk and talk on their own they're so goddamn old. These aren't the best and brightest of our country, these are old people who can no longer string together enough thoughts to understand their mere presence is hurting the entire countr…
> How else would you deal with people who are too old to do the job, and too senile to realize they can no longer perform and should abdicate? Mandatory retirement age? Voters being adults and fucking paying attention, instead of acting like children and believing everything they see on TV and social media?
I have trouble predicting how public sentiment will evolve over time. I'm not that young, and still and the last 10 years have left me with an absolutely blistering distrust of the 70+ crowd on any matter pertaining to positions of authority. I'd like to see ~67 and ~72 become the other 18 and 21: hard lines beyond which the law progressively rescinds the presumption of total competence. It's not a pretty solution. T…
I completely agree. With so many high profile cases of people suffering from some form of dementia being elected to important offices (McConnell and Feinstein; Biden and Trump), it's clear that the intended electoral mechanism isn't working to replace people who are not fit to serve. Name recognition & incumbency advantage are just too strong to allow the right thing to happen. The version of the fix that I like is,…
It feels that while gerontocracy is a valid critique to illustrate the problem, it doesn't fully capture why our processes actively choose such bad leaders. Rather it kind of papers over the problem assuming that mental faculties mean good policies [0], give us a comforting thought that most of the recent relevant candidates would have been out of the picture, while not actually addressing the "shit sandwich vs turd torta" dynamic.
As for the Senate itself, I'd propose increasing the number of senators to 6 per state to dilute this effect of a strong senator being a boon to state regardless of how bad their politics are. Perhaps straight term limits for the Senate and the House as well.
[0] while it certainly means better policies than what we have now, the bar is currently on the floor.
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Yes it did. Billionaires are a relatively new thing, but successful businesses were led by young people across the entirety of human history. And you should not praise someone for simply being a billionaire. That's a bad thing to be.
> Yes it did. I don't recall any. I remember when people were all agog when Gates became one. > successful businesses were led by young people across the entirety of human history. Sure. But billionaires? > And you should not praise someone for simply being a billionaire. If they're self-made, they earned the praise. > That's a bad thing to be. Creating value is not a bad thing. Being a self-made billionaire means th…
They aren’t and they didn’t.
> Being a self-made billionaire means they created a billion dollars of value. They didn't take it from you or anyone else.
Nobody is a “self made” billionaire. That value you’re talking about didn’t just spring into existence. It had to come from somewhere. There is always a source.
Who flew the rocket? Who built the rocket? Who built the parts for the rocket? Who mixed the fuel?
Building big ambitious things is a good thing. But consolidating an amount of money that nobody could ever reasonably spend into the hands of one person (especially when that money is just the excess value produced by the workers) is unethical and unneeded.
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I think that's exactly what OP meant? While Trump's policies take the long term gerontocratic/anarcho-capitalist dynamics strangling of our society and crank them to 11, a lot of younger people ended up buying into his "burn it all down" messaging imagining it would result in some principled evenly-applied reform that might get the boot off their own necks. And that level of foolishness seems straight from the naive…
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If you don't like my phrasing of "boot on their necks", feel free to substitute your own when constructively responding to the point. The frustrations that have led to Trumpism are certainly palpable and understandable, so don't feign like I'm using hyperbolic language out of nowhere.
But no, in general I am comfortable modeling Trump's second term as a complete self-own on the part of voters - regardless of whether they've realized it yet, or ever will. As a libertarian who partook in both red and blue tribe media and was both sidesing through 2020, I have not come to this conclusion lightly. There has simply been no way I've been able to steelman it.
> Our gerontocracy is not the result of a malevolent plan, .. Boomers aren't distinctively evil.. The fact that they are so numerous and the fact that they are aging in era when life has been extended make the syndrome endemic. .. America faces a gerontocratic crisis of succession on the scale of society itself. The melodrama of succession—waiting for the old to make way for the new—defines not only our politics bu…
> cordial relations between the generations are over Is ageism not like racism, sexism, etc.? Do you have decent relations with your living parents and grandparents?
First, young people didn't choose this. It's been coming from the other direction and out in the open for a very long time. Why not make it official that it's mutual? Past time this was acknowledged, expected, and planned for. Second, I don't dislike all old people in all cultures or anything like that. We're talking about a specific cohort that shares the same experiences and most of the same perspectives. This isn't about who they are anyway, or about what they are like in some abstract sense. It's about what they've done as group and continue to do.
Boomers wrecked the veritable paradise that their own parents built with unforced errors and some combination of greed, stupidity, and malice. Then they blew up the lives of their children, and have moved on towards wrecking the rest of the country and indeed the whole world as much as possible before they check out. They did that, not some impersonal forces of history.
America IS boomers. That's the whole point of the article. Are things going well? America may not actually survive boomers. There's no point in a long list of their crimes, it's in TFA too, and everyone knows the inheritance. Housing crisis, national debt, and climate change alone would be a crippling blow for posterity, but now that's just a few of the disasters ahead, and we're in a much worse position to meet any of it. The first generation that was actually selfish and stupid enough to piss away so much prosperity that they've very likely ruined things for several generations. Boomers can't even disagree with this, because who would they blame? They'd have to sit down, shut up, and let someone else steer.
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They shouldn't get any. This is a fund for widows, orphans, and those who are simply unable to earn any sort of money to fund their survival. They're none of the above.
SS was set up as an annuity, not a charity.
It's a taxpayer-funded insurance policy, where the risk is you being alive without a way to earn a living. We have effectively managed that risk for a very large portion of the people who are collecting on that insurance policy by switching over to a service economy where most jobs do not require the physical labor that an elderly person cannot safely do. Furthermore, they're also the portion of the population with the longest time to have accumulated assets.
If you want to keep the insurance policy sustainable for the next generation - who is also paying into it - you need to treat it like an insurance policy. If you allow people to make any and all claims against the funds backing an insurance policy, the funds will eventually be depleted as there will be more people withdrawing from it than paying in. You also have to account for the opportunity cost of the people paying into that system not paying into something else, like our ballooning national debt, or the debts that many Americans of working age have to take on to maintain a decent standard of living.
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By law is how we got to where we currently are. There's no reason to think that would change. You'd have to trick all the people who are old (plus all the people who realize they will get old too) to vote away their assets, income, and power. Unrest will just harden the people who see your cause as unjust against it. That will be a strong majority of people, so will go no where. Revolution seems highly unlikely to su…
> Unrest will just harden the people who see your cause as unjust against it. That will be a strong majority of people, so will go no where. I think you're wrong here. Most people are pretty fed up right now.
Instead, a substantial fraction of the population don't care enough to vote one way or the other. Those that do vote have been pushing us toward the system we have now.
It's going to be hard to sell policies that disenfranchise old people...
There are a lot of people who don't want to be penniless and homeless with a diminished capacity to work. That includes people who are old already and people who realize they will become old.
That's why I think this is all a scam. We are, almost all of us, old people or people who hope to get old. This is an effort to get us all upset enough at each other that we don't stop to realize we're fighting ourselves.
It you want to unravel the scam, follow the money.