Yep, another wannabe John Galt who’d end up as another corporate peon if not a favela dweller in his Randian wonderland.
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And what did they spend it on? You may disagree with what they used it for, in your country (I have no idea) they may have used it less wisely than you like. But some if it (quite a lot in most cases) was spent on
- education
- law and order
- infrastructure (of all kinds)
- healthcare (in some possibly more ‘civilised’ countries [accepts some people will decide that is bait])
- welfare safety nets (yes, I know you said welfare, but see the other things in this list?)
- defence (and in some cases war)
- health and safety, environment, trading standards, consumer protection, etc
- and so on
My point is, they didn’t just piss it all down the drain or burn it, OR SPEND IT ALL ON WELFARE. They may have pissed some of it away and we all disagree as to which part. State pensions are not like private pension funds, in the UK at least, they have always been part of the welfare state (funded from current tax revenue) with a degree of discretion as to the level of benefit, as is the case for all benefits. And my (UK) payslip does not purport that any tax deducted is hypothecated for old age support. So if your point is “actually it’s all the fault of governments” well, obviously. But not for the reason you seem to believe. So, as GilbertWham said: Puh-leaze!
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Not really, because the “trickle down” of wealth is an integral part of neoliberal ideology. We know that aspect has proven itself a sham over the past 40 years, but the greed-driven fantasies of temporarily embarrassed millionaires die hard (especially if they’re white American males).
[quote=“anon15383236, post:14, topic:91368, full:true”]
I don’t think it’s a good idea to speak of technological sophistication as if it “naturally” leads to steadily declining standards of living for all but a few.[/quote]
I read that as talking about employment prospects rather than standards of living. Race-to-the-bottom globalism means that there are a lot of Americans with life-improving technological wonders that exceed Gene Roddenberry’s dreams in their pockets and bodies but who are also lucky if they have an exploitative low-paid part-time job or two. A mobile phone can only do so much to distract from the stress of knowing you won’t make this month’s rent.
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Don’t bother; grown-up rebuttals don’t work. It just leads to doubling down I’m afraid.
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[quote] In a way, this is the rupture that Thomas Piketty predicted: as capital accumulates into fewer and fewer hands, the rich will have an increasingly outsized in setting policy, and will not allow any policies that undermine their further capital accumulation – hence climate denial, mass surveillance, privatization of public goods from education to health care, violent suppression of oppositions and protest movements. This leads to increasingly worse outcomes for everyone who isn’t in the elite (socialized losses, privatized gains) and political instability, which eventually becomes more expensive to put down than it would be to remediate through fairer policies.
[/quote]
…and then what? Does something good eventually emerge from this, or is it all Orwell for the foreseeable future?
When faced with a systemic failure that inspires widespread fear and insecurity, how is it possible for compassion and rationality to triumph over the impulses of the lizard brain? It seems like it would just create an endless feedback loop that keeps getting scarier as we respond to the crisis irrationally, thereby creating a worse crisis, to which we then respond with even more irrational behavior, and so on. How do the people who want to stay calm and think things through ever take charge?
Point taken. (I guess there is a track record and your “again” was not a general comment but perhaps a more directed one.)
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From the comments section:
Our order was created in 1946. Its not just Neo-liberalism but all Liberalism.Liberalism claims are being proven to be untrue and unworkable just like communism. Some core ideas are:“men and women are the same and are interchangeable”“all races are the same and should all live together”“a country is an economic area”
“everything’s based on rationalism and materialism and is purely a calculation of economic self-interest”
The Altright is winning because it is offering identity and meaning and group belonging to white people, when liberalism only offered confusion, self-negation and lonely individualism.
Expect the fascists to take further advantage of this lexigraphic confusion.
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1. If the rich have more money, they will create more jobs;
2. Lower taxes will lead to more prosperity;
3. Increases in housing and stock market prices will increase prosperity for everyone;
4. Trade deals and globalization will make everyone better off.
The above has been proven to be totally unadulterated BullShit! It is not true, it won’t ever be true, and the TGOP knows this.
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It is, but the transition to automation and decline of working class opportunities was happening before the term “neoliberalism” meant what it does today or those laissez faire policies were embraced. Neoliberalism is part of the problem, but the issues are larger than just that. I think it’s more rhetorically effective to delineate the various anti-education, anti-labor, deregulatory, pro-globalization, pro-monopoly, anti-competitive principles and how they’ve created widespread misery among the working class than using a blanket term for some of that that has no widely agreed upon definition or even a widely understood one.
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Neoliberalism hasn’t failed; it was hugely successful at achieving what it was built for.
The destruction of working class gains and massive transfer of wealth to the top wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. Looting the peasantry for the benefit of the aristocracy was the whole point.
The trickle-down bullshit was just marketing spin to keep the rubes distracted while the bosses raided the treasury.
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Sooner or later (usually later, given the longue duree) the elites get too decadent in their greed, too small demographically, and too excessive and overconfident in their mechanisms of control and distraction. Their subjects revolt, their guard labour turns on them, and it’s over. If that revolution does come and is successful, it’s rarely the people who want to stay calm and think things through who take charge.
Put another way:
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It is a big part of the problem and yeah the other things were happening already and would eventually have had to be dealt with but neoliberalism accelerated all the other problems by orders of magnitude ,denying the world time to adjust to the other things. That is its real evil.
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“Gladstonian liberalism” was the original.
Which is where the main Australian right-wing political party drew its name from:
The problem isn’t with the word “liberal”, the problem is in the American understanding of it. Elsewhere in the world, “liberal” does not mean “left wing”; it only means that in the USA because your politics are distorted so far to the right that the American left were too scared to identify as socialists.
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[quote]was[/quote]https://media.giphy.com/media/1ube10l4xArN6/giphy.gif
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If you can explain how the missing twenty percent from my paycheck would help address big problems like climate change in my hands I’d like to to hear it.
The future belongs to the young, not unproductive rent seeking entitled seniors who somehow imagine ten percent more pennies to pinch will solve it all.
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regarding coal miners, saw this this morning:
http://www.npr.org/2016/12/15/505577680/advanced-black-lung-cases-surge-in-appalachia
basically, as coal mines shutdown, workers finally get themselves checked for black lung disease, and thousands of people are diagnosed.
who’s going to pay? not the out of work workers, not the CEOs. privatized gains, and a public health epidemic.
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I wish I could say that this was the final screw-job these put-upon people will be handed, but if we’ve learned anything from 2016 it’s that rock bottom is further away than we ever thought.
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I think there’s an animating philosophy at the heart of liberalism that is best understood by looking at chaos theory and emergence.
Liberalism, within political philosophy is best understood as a theory based on contracts. Endow individuals with certain rights, and structure the state to best protect those rights. The basic unit of society is the individual-- not larger structures.
Consider, if you will, cellular automata
The interesting structures that result are the result of the individual units acting and interacting according to simple rules on the individual level. They are not a top down phenomenon.
A liberal theorist believes that a “good” society can only be understood as cooperation and competition among individuals. A top down attempt to recreate the useful aspects of a society that has built itself up in this manner is likely to fail, because societal structures designed from the top down tend to simplify out the useful complexity.
From an economic point of view, the societal structure that best exemplifies this emergent phenomenon is the “free market.” Instead of two, or three, or perhaps five different actors as in a democratic republic, the free market offers the promise of thousands of actors, interacting in far more complex patterns. There would a role for the state in ensuring that monopolies did not emerge, but even then, neoliberal antitrust theory is organized around the idea that prices are more important than concentrations of power.
It’s not at all clear that the apparent beneficiaries of neoliberal theories are all that enthusiastic about this purported emphasis on competition. ALEC is a prime counterexample. The idea of federalism (theoretically) invites smaller governmental units to offer competing visions in the political market, rooted in local wisdom and biases. ALEC is based on the idea that these states should pass one sized fits all solutions-- possibly because state legislatures are (or, alas, were) easier to buy than national legislatures.
However, neoliberalism does offer a prescription for dismantling a state that relies on state-run monopolies. A ideology of convenience, perhaps.
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If all your needs are fulfilled by ‘Andreessen Index’ commodities; you are totally golden. If, like some sort of weird ‘social mammal’, your needs include things not addressed by the world’s most ovoid venture capitalist, the historical trajectory of your buying power is vastly less exciting.
Perhaps most magnificently not-even-wrong is #14:“Note that consumer costs rising most quickly (education, health care) have least tech innovation and least market competition.”
Like any good not-even-wrong thesis, it contains a core of truth(education and health care do have notably dysfunctional ‘markets’; and while education has exotic new R&D tools for university research groups and medicine has cool new therapies; neither have had much success in ‘tech innovation’ that gets rid of those pesky labor costs); but then runs off into the weeds:
Yes, despite ‘e learning’ and similar attempts, good educational results stubbornly continue to be most reliably produced by a relatively low student-to-teacher ratio. But why does that lead to cost increases? Especially if I am working in a field where technological developments have sharply increased productivity, shouldn’t I be able to afford more teacher-hours than I could back in the day? Oh, haha, that would only be the case if I had captured any of the gains, rather than treading water or being rightsized, never mind…
Medicine is a similar case: it’s wholly unsurprising that my ability to afford some bleeding-edge recombinant-monoclonal-antibodies-and-whizbangs therapy is limited; and advances in available technology have likely increased our ability to produce extremely costly solutions to previously unsolvable problems; but that doesn’t explain why getting some face time with an MD and a prescription for something that has been off-patent for a decade or more is getting more costly relative to my buying power, not remaining static or declining.
It isn’t false that goods and services that have either been largely automated or successfully offshored to labor supplies even poorer than you have become relatively more affordable; and technological improvements mean that stuff that wasn’t on anybody’s table historically is at least on the market; but his whole exercise(aside from the absurdity of ignoring actually-somewhat-important and life critical goods to talk about gloriously affordable MP3 players…) tactfully elides the question of why, exactly, the default for anything whose cost of production isn’t falling through the floor is to become less affordable for most people, rather than remaining largely static; or becoming more affordable because buyers have become more productive through technological improvement.
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Given that these are the kind of techno-utopians who believe that a semen-like goop is a suitable and “disruptive” substitute for food (not only for the peons but, quite shamefully, for themselves) it would seem that a firm grasp of fundamental requirements – of economics, of education, of medicine, and indeed for achieving the lower tiers of Maslow’s pyramid – is something they’ve lost over time.
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