181–190 of 192 posts
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Don't feed the troll, folks, This is a junk comment, probably by a bot.
I think my comment above was made in haste because UBI seems dire to me. But, barring some sort of Cartesian evil demon tricking me I am not a bot.
I normally don't reply to such accounts at all.
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Money supply has little to do with inflation. You can print like crazy and have about 0 inflation (a decade before Covid) or you can raise rates and have huge inflation. It's because inflation happens when supply of goods is limited. Covid messed up the supply chain -> inflation happened. Some printing may even lower prices because it allows production at scale to happen. If you just print and just helicopter money y…
>(a decade before Covid) You are aware that the increase in money supply from 2020 to 2022 is about the same as the increase from 2010 to 2020, despite ~45% lower GDP growth? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS
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It's mainly wealth distribution. The top percent owns too much while the bottom 80% owns too little. There won't be inflation if you take money from the top and give it to the bottom. The total amount of money stays the same.
> There won't be inflation if you take money from the top and give it to the bottom. The total amount of money stays the same. Our system is far from perfect but I believe history shows that communism is even worse.
Even the US has had outright state-sponsored corporations at times (Springfield Armory etc) and it’s fine. The Manhattan Project literally won the war, alongside collectivization of the economy for war production.
Collective worker ownership of the means of production is extraordinarily normalized in Germany (and a frequent source of conflict with US politicians who solicit automaker facilities in anti-labor locales) as well as other european countries (Husqvarna Vapensfabrik, Royal Dutch Shell Company, etc). There is no particular slippery slope here, some companies operate for centuries like this.
The communistic nature of kibbutzim in israel were/are also extraordinarily successful.
These things generally are good for workers and bring equality and stability to their countries. You just have to get past the trite third-grade "communism is actually bad" soundbyte (and the tendency to funnel anything that's mildly pro-worker into the "communism" bucket of course).
And remember, there's plenty of Pinochets and Suhartos and Malaysian juntas to go around for all political systems. Just like there are also plenty of inefficient capitalist organizations too - capitalism is not a magic wand for efficiency either.
In fact when you get down to it... corporations are really their own small little centrally-planned economies and dictatorships. And if they become too large to fail you get exactly the same failure modes as state corporations etc. Boeing might as well be a soviet OKB for all it matters. What, precisely, is the value or merit in quibbling over such a distinction?
Human societies surviving the next century is going to require a great deal of collectivism and cooperation, let alone the obvious internal problems with social equity. But people still think “but communism is bad” (by which they of course mean anything from German cooperatives to Stalinism) is the height of political discourse like they’re in a Fox News primetime special lol. Like, they got you real good didn’t they?
I think it's also something of an X-Y problem... people identify with "capitalism = rugged individualism" and don't realize that Boeing siphoning taxpayer dollars for airplanes the doors fall off of, or pinochet giving citizens "helicopter rides" or suharto burning citizens alive in barrels or the world's most repressive prison system is just as much a feature of capitalism as OKBs or the gulag archipelago or stalin's purges were a features of communism. Because those are orthogonal problems, those are the problems with authoritarianism not the unit of economic organization.
But "communism bad" - thank you so much for that contribution to the discourse! Nobody's ever said that before! /s
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> Do you know anybody who is financially struggling? I know plenty of people who are financially struggling. I am not convinced that the best way to help them is to make them perpetually dependent on the state for direct subsidies, instead of addressing the problems that are making it difficult them from becoming more financially secure within a pluralistic economy.
I agree that addressing the systemic issues that are contributing to inequality is ideal, but that is a huge tangle to unwind. UBI doesn't solve those issues. But UBI is a pragmatic help to people here and now in a single stroke. The ideal solution would require somehow rewinding the clock to make corporations pay more taxes, undoing much of the corporate welfare, getting society to be truly colorblind (vs those who…
I'm not sure that it is. It sounds like a transfer of dependency to an even more centralized institution with even more dubious motivations.
> The ideal solution would require somehow rewinding the clock to make corporations pay more taxes
I'm not sure how making corporations pay higher taxes would resolve any such problem. It seems like it would have the opposite effect, and centralize more control over wealth in the hands of political institutions.
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> As to gerrymandering, what makes you think it has any real effect? Without gerrymandering the Republican party would have last controlled the House in 2007.
Republicans won the Congressional Popular vote exactly half the time since then: 2010 (by almost 7 points), 2014 (by almost 6), 2016, and 2022. As long as we are talking about counter-factual political systems: If the US had a parliamentary system like most democracies, Republicans would have controlled the presidency for 8 of the last 16 years. Given their coalition of disaffected minorities and recent immigrants, D…
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Republicans won the Congressional Popular vote exactly half the time since then: 2010 (by almost 7 points), 2014 (by almost 6), 2016, and 2022. As long as we are talking about counter-factual political systems: If the US had a parliamentary system like most democracies, Republicans would have controlled the presidency for 8 of the last 16 years. Given their coalition of disaffected minorities and recent immigrants, D…
One of these complaints, that Republicans benefit from the structural tilt away from densely populated states, is objective. The other, your argument that Democrats reliance on immigrants enables machine politics, is subjective. They aren't directly comparable arguments; the latter argument feels like special pleading.
The point that directly elected executives give rise to different political dynamics is no less objective. Among those political dynamics is the feasibility of blasting a nationwide message that embodies the party in a person low information voters can relate to. That’s been a major enabler of Democratic machine politics aimed at immigrants. And these days, it’s an enabler of MAGA machine politics.
It’s quite different in Westminster style parliamentary statements, where people in different districts vote for different candidates.
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I think my comment above was made in haste because UBI seems dire to me. But, barring some sort of Cartesian evil demon tricking me I am not a bot.
Then perhaps post under an actual account? That one does not lend itself to much credibility. I normally don't reply to such accounts at all.
Just because yours looks real doesn't make it so. Anyone can make up a real-sounding name.
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I don't know if that's obvious, and I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt and explicitly state their positions before I presume that they are simply regurgitating erroneous media hype. Despite much misinformation to the contrary, Citizens United had nothing whatsoever to do with campaign donations and was standard first-amendment jurisprudence striking down an attempt by a federal agency to exercise prior…
> Despite much misinformation to the contrary, Citizens United had nothing whatsoever to do with campaign donations and was standard first-amendment jurisprudence striking down an attempt by a federal agency to exercise prior restraint on speech. Only when viewed over-literally. If you take a perspective akin to "duck typing," it's both . But even if you're totally right, this whole digression on the term "campaign d…
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> There won't be inflation if you take money from the top and give it to the bottom. The total amount of money stays the same. Our system is far from perfect but I believe history shows that communism is even worse.
Dismissing entire categories of systems and approaches under a multitude of different situations and circumstances speaks more to how effective you personally have been propagandized. Even the US has had outright state-sponsored corporations at times (Springfield Armory etc) and it’s fine. The Manhattan Project literally won the war, alongside collectivization of the economy for war production. Collective worker owne…
> those are the problems with authoritarianism not the unit of economic organization
Communism requires authoritarianism. It's inherent to operating system. When you take resources from some and distribute to others, who, exactly, does the taking and giving?
Monoculture micro-communities like kibbutz don't show anything. Nation-states are diverse groups of hundreds of millions with competing beliefs, values, and goals. Communism cannot serve these diverse interests. It requires a group of authoritarians that choose from whom to take and whom to give and the abject suffering of many is the result, every time. There is no freedom or liberty, that's by design. It's a failure with disastrous consequences.
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> There won't be inflation if you take money from the top and give it to the bottom. The total amount of money stays the same. Our system is far from perfect but I believe history shows that communism is even worse.
Communism is indeed worse, but that doesn't automatically make our current system 'good' . Yes it's the best we tried so far, but it's not like we tried soo many others and this one ended up being the best out of all the ones tested. I'm sure if we took all the top math, quant, economy and finance grads in the world and book them for a few months in that fancy Swiss Alps resort at Davos where world leaders meet up ev…
That isn't an obvious conclusion. To the extent the current system is one, improving it with such an approach doesn't account for:
- It having too many parts to understand without resorting to highly lossy models.
- Its non-features being far more impactful than its features.