These rich folks should probably study Mao and the revolutions of 1848 before the worst possible things happen.
Have you not noticed they are on the offense? It's the poor who need to study Mao.
American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn
291–300 of 360 posts
Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, the Party members were more equal.
so... they made a society with a lot of inequality and it fell apart?
There were a multitude of reasons that USSR collapsed, and reasonable people can argue which were more or less important. I don't think it's reasonable to argue it was due to equality (which wasn't even a thing). Inequality certainly was a thing and one of the reasons, in addition to the Afghan War, Perestroika, Glasnost, the coup attempt, the independence movements of member states. I personally think inequality and structured economic collapse was the biggest culprit.
Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
You just named symptoms not cause. 1. People vote for old idiots . 2. Local politics is all about milking any potential work with permits. Sky rocket housing due to that . 3. American lost engineering culture everywhere except software . Now software is dead as industry we used to know
Personally I think those are also symptoms. In my opinion, the cause is: 1. Easy money for far, far, far too long in the US and a complete political unwillingness to take any risk of a recession, no matter the long-term cost required to stave it off. In my mind, this explains the rich-poor gap, the rise of crypto, insane valuations, house-price inflation, the weird delta between US and rest-of-world standard of livin…
Easy money and cheap (foreign) labor are one and the same. Political parties that are not accountable for this are the upstream problem. In other words, it’s a failure of what we think of as our “democracy.” The will of the people doesn’t mean much when you can just swap out “the people” to get what you will.
Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me more specific. I am talking about wealth that is generated by capturing value from existing assets, transactions, and people rather than by producing new goods, services, or productivity gains. Examples are rent-seeking (making money through ownership, monopoly power, licensing, etc), financial extraction (financial manipulation, speculation, debt, and asset appreciation), housing and land appreciation, middle…
> I don't know how you cannot buy something. Consider rents. You call that extraction. It is not, as when you rent you exchange money for use of the property. If you've ever been a landlord, you'll find out about how much it costs to make a unit available to rent. There are also high risks associated with it - Mayor Mandami is threatening to confiscate apartment buildings that have a beehive in them. Bad tenants can…
When I rent an apartment, I'm obviously receiving something of value in return. The question is where the landlord's increasing profit comes from. If they make more profit from building new housing, maintaining it, improving it, and taking on risk, that's creating value. But if the profit comes primarily from owning a scarce asset that has appreciated because of zoning restrictions, land scarcity, market conditions, or monopoly ownership then no new wealth is created.
A massive number of businesses have failed in my city due to high rents. There are actually a good amount of commercial vacancies and in healthy market you would expect landlords to lower their prices to attract tenants -- but they don't. The actual value of the property is increasing at a rate that they actually don't have to rent out the space. The economics make it better for it sit empty. This is effectively destroying wealth for small business owners.
Selling food isn't extraction. Growing more food, improving yields, creating better products, and serving more customers is wealth creation.
My point is that an increasing amount of economic growth doesn't come from producing more value. It comes from finding ways to extract more revenue from existing value. Smaller packages for the same price, subscription fees, service charges, planned obsolescence, monopolistic pricing, rent increases, financial engineering, and other mechanisms that increase profits without a corresponding increase in output.
In other words, "growth" is being driven by capturing a larger share of the pie rather than making the pie bigger. Just look around, this is what everyone is complaining about!
Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn
#295Is there any graceful way to let the pressure out of the system and begin rebuilding trust and stability or is the only way out to immanentize the eschaton?
Legislation and court rulings have shown that shareholders get everything they want, ever. They want Southwest to stop checking 2 free bags? It happens. Etc. Ad Nauseum. Somehow, we need legislation that says companies are beholden first to their employees, then to their customers, THEN to shareholders. I don't know how to do that. Co-ops are the only real answer maybe?
The US actually has a legal structure for employees to have beneficial (+ tax advantaged) ownership of their companies, the ESOP (employee stock ownership plan). It's a legal structure where a trust buys the company from the original owners on behalf of the employees and then allocates a percentage of those shares to the employees each year.
There's no requirement that this be a 100% ownership arrangement, but there are a surprising number of companies in the US where that's the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_compani...
Since it's basically a leveraged buyout of the company by the employees, it provides a much more ethical succession option (IMHO) for privately held companies with founders who want to step down but do not want to sell to private equity. I wish more people were aware of it as an option.
Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just see political influence as separate issue. Make sure they cannot lobby/donate (prison if they do) and problem solved. Why being tangiable so important? E.g. a billionare made it on physical music CD cs one made it on music streaming? As long as it's legal, why prioritize physical form?
That's too naive. Laws work differently once you have billions of dollars. They can and will be bent and politicians will be too happy to do that for you. It's win win for both. Ignoring this aspect of the way the world works is living in a fantasy world, no less fantastic than a communist utopia. Oh! I chose my word poorly. Streaming is very much "tangible" in the sense I had intended. "No regret transaction" is per…
How much bending is actually happening vs just hypotheticals thought? Elon Musk donated a lot and then suddenly Big Beautiful Bill hit Tesla very hard. Doesn't sound like he got a favor paid back. Also, not that we should emulate Russia (not at all) but since 2000s there any oligarch trying to do anything political goes to jail or "falls out of their window". So possible in principle to remove the influence (I don't approve of the method though).
Sure, HTF is zero sum. I just think that focus on it is excessive. 99.9% of businesses are not. Regret would be nice to include in consideration but I doubt one can reliably measure it in practice
Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
"seems" as based on vibes? Beware of nostalgia bias! It is true that middle class has been shrinking. What is often overlooked though ks that the majority of that middle class moved on to the upper class, so not bad at all and aligns with "growing pie"
I accept the criticism in name but cannot invalidate a lived experience just because it has not been quantified accurately. > majority of that middle class moved on to the upper class Is this true in the US in inflation adjusted terms ? Can say that it is certainly reversed direction in my country.
Yes, people are getting wealthier in real terms, including the poor. Especially if you quantify it the right way: absolute consumption/expenditures, not relative % from median income (relative count will always show there are poor people even if they would appear insanely "rich" to a poor person from 100 years ago or from Afghanistan).
On lived experience: my lived experience tells me the Earth is flat.
Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
But our bridges and infrastructure are crumbling
Those are issues of priority and revenue generation, not capability.
Soon we won't have the capabilities. See the nuclear industry and how we don't have the people and training to do the work anymore.
Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn
#299I'm kind of confused. It's not clear to me how or why the line keeps going up. People are spending less because of economic insecurity, everything is more expensive because of tariffs and war, interest rates have been high for four years. The general cultural mood feels unsustainable. Like the peak-woke period around 2022 before the pendulum swung really hard in the opposite direction. I don't know if there's a word…
It's a bubble. When the music stops, everyone will be crying.
Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rich man, PAC advertising
Political advertising has no effect on my vote. Does it affect yours? Consider that Hillary outspent Trump 2:1 in the 2016 election, and lost. Same story in 2024, Trump was way outspent by Harris. Harris lost. Advertising doesn't work if the message is bad.
But then according to the tenets of efficiency of a free market system no candidate would be spending so much on advertisement.
You can't have it both ways, (i) free market is ideal and efficient. Prices are correct and fair etc etc (ii) But doesn't apply to campaign spending.