Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/14/pareto-optimal-selfishness.html
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Unbridled “free”-market capitalism and the complacency of wealthy conservatives toward its unquestioned virtue certainly laid the groundwork for a right-wing populist backlash, as it did in the 1920s and 1930s.
Fascism is arising at the worst possible moment
Well it seldom arises at the best possible moment. Disaster, economic and otherwise, is usually a precursor to fascism.
If the American middle-class lifestyles permitted by the postwar economic anomaly were still possible for most people; if we weren’t seeing the predictable outcomes of displacement caused by climate change and/or wars by and for oligarchs; if we still had enough people who were adults in the 1930s and 40s to tell us how awful fascism was; if all that was true we wouldn’t be seeing it crawl out of the sewers of history as we are now.
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The problem is socialistm and the redistribution of the workers wealth.
As it stands in the USA SS owed 220 trillion dollars.
In the UK the state owes 13 trillion pounds.
The problem is a lack of capitalism
In the UK Mr Average has lost 2 million just because the state spent his wealth and didn’t invest it.
But its the standard revisionist approach.
X becomes personal non gratia , aurbrush them out.
Or Venuzela. The Great socialist ideal. Well it was. They bet that with all the oil money it would work, unlike all the previous examples. Except it didn’t. So now its the wrong sort of soicalism
Same with the debt numbers. The money has been redistributed as the socialist want. But its now a disaster. So what to do? Blame someone else.
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‘Capitalism’ lifted more than a billion people from poverty; fascism is socialism without pity.
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Do you want to look at the first century of the industrial revolution before you make that claim again? Socialism, communism, Marxism and anarchism didn’t come from nowhere, they came in an attempt to counter the poverty and disease that 19th century capitalists didn’t care about. So what if a worker is too ill to work today, there is always someone else desperate enough who they can replace them with permanently.
The billion people lifted from poverty came after socialism started to gain power, and the capitalist classes started worrying about the gallows and guillotine.
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It was the last thirty years that saw the greatest alleviation of misery. I don’t recall any capitalists worrying about guillotines at the time.
Plenty of examples of capitalists getting scared by the prospect of workers’ revolutions since the Industrial one. Here’s a sampling, each leading to what some would call socialist-style reforms to capitalism (and what others would call onerous regulation on tycoons) in the short or long term:
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No, because they’ve created a sense of no alternatives (Thatcherism, or TINA), or any proposed alternative being tantamount of fascism. But the minimizing of the worst effects of capitalism during the 20th century, thanks to actual alternatives that existed in the real world that @anon73430903 discusses, created enough of a buffer to continue to mitigate the worst effects of capitalism. These are longer processes than your supposing, I think. The nationalist right wing has also managed to capture at least some of the mindshare via the culture wars. The hard right is on the rise across the world, based on some of the effects of the end of the communist bloc.
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A person should not believe in an “ism,” he should believe in himself.
Spoken like a true capitalist!
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Interesting, but nothing to support the thesis that the unprecedented rise in prosperity in the last generation came from fear of revolution.
Because the threat of a communist take over or other kinds of popular uprisings was part of the calculus of creating a stronger set of regulations and the welfare state that you saw in the 20th century. The welfare state was created by the ruling class under fear of popular uprisings.
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It doesn’t seem that the welfare state is responsible for the rise in global income; rather it was most probably increased trade.
Yeah, I think you’re off base there. You only get a rise in global income if the profits of international trade are evenly distributed via some mechanism. Given the grinding poverty in the late 19th century, when wages and the selling of one’s labor was coming to fully replace other forms of being able to feed, clothe, and shelter oneself and one’s family, at a point were global trade was pretty high already, it’s not a given that increased trade = higher income for all. The welfare state and regulatory regimes were created specifically to ensure wider distribution of money and resources.
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Only if you believe that workers’ rights don’t lead to a more prosperous and pleasant society. Every one of them that we take for granted today, including the 8-hour work day, had to be dragged from the capitalist bosses and their owned-and-operated politicians who would have never done it on their own. Sometimes, as in the cases I mention, they did it out of pants-pissing fear.
As for the last 22 years, that rise in prosperity has come in places other than the U.S., places like China and India where capitalism in practise is far from the Libertarian ideal and also far from the preferences of workers’ rights advocates. During that period in the industrialised West, in contrast, we’ve seen increasing inequality as neoliberal economic philosophy often demands the rollback of those same rights.
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Yes, I am talking about global poverty and that it was trade and liberal business practices that enriched people.
The problem is that “socialism” as a workable alternative to capitalism greatly depends on what is meant by the term. If simply a Scandinavian-style welfare state, then all good and well. But in all honesty, these are not socialist states in either the idealistic 19th-century sense of Marx, Proudhon, and other thinkers or in the 20th century “real existing socialism” (as they called it) created by the Soviet Union and its offspring. They are simply capitalist states with slightly higher taxes and small militaries so that more resources can be given to social programs.
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That’s a part of it. However, free trade can and does exist outside a purely capitalist system and, as mentioned above, under a mostly unfettered capitalist system can result in people in one country rising to the lower-middle class while people in another country find themselves falling to it.
I support free trade, but not without strong workers’ rights protections. That includes free movement of labour, but try telling that to xenophobic proponents of brain-dead protectionism like Il Douche.
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The last 30 years (my teens to today) have been me experiencing open doors being slammed shut in my face in the name of capitalism. I’m seeing the effects of austerity in Oxford (not considered poor) causing poverty that wasn’t there 10 years ago, and people are literally dying because of it.
Some of todays capitalists are fearing the guillotine, of those some favour taxation and welfare, while others are supporting fascism as a distraction tactic. The rest are like drug addicts who have been told by doctors that carrying on like they are will kill them, but immediately after leaving the surgery go in search of their drug dealer.
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