They’re still stuck in the “socialism” vs. “capitalism” paradigm.
No one gives a shit about your private property. This isn’t the 19th or 20th centuries. Yang isn’t saying he wants the government to seize my land to collectivize agriculture. He is saying he wants the government to pump investment into my area, heat up the economy, make it easier to pay my bills and give us the money we have always needed to overthrow oligarchies at all levels of government.
.@AndrewYang: "It's called a fourth industrial revolution, and it led directly to Donald Trump being elected in that we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Iowa." @HillTVLive https://t.co/OFFa3oBIbX pic.twitter.com/dMoBXtPPYL
— The Hill (@thehill) March 22, 2019
.@AndrewYang: If elected president I will "update GDP for the 21st century." https://t.co/U6rrIsKWPF pic.twitter.com/gABxpIeep1
— HILLTV (@HillTVLive) March 22, 2019
I keep hearing that is “welfare.”
This is your brain on conservatism and lolbertarianism. The underlying assumption is that we are not supposed to care about the well-being of our own people. We’re supposed to be radical individualists who care about nothing else in life except securing enormous corporate tax cuts for people who hate us. We should also leave it up to the free-market to sort it out with people who are doxxed.
Is Donald Trump going to bring all the jobs back to the Alabama Black Belt that have been lost in sharecropping and manufacturing? He is peddling nothing but nostalgia to people. No one is picking cotton and people are still losing their jobs in manufacturing. It is Dollar General and fast food restaurants that have been expanding their operations here. The Trump economy has made wealthy investors richer while more people are working as independent contractors for minimum wage. It is the Herbert Hoover economy with a suicide and opioid epidemic. If the economy is so great for White people, why is their life expectancy dropping for the first time ever in American history?
The best thing we can do to help White people is to give them health care, investment, a floor under their lives and an end to debt slavery and wage slavery. The alternative is a combination of Boomer nostalgia that Trump is going to take us back to the 1950s and Boomer fear that a Democrat is going to take their arsenal of guns and turn the country into Venezuela.
Life would actually improve for most White people with Conservatism, Inc. gone and a government that wasn’t so singlemindedly focused on delivering on the MIGA agenda.
Note: BTW, the Cold War ended when I was 11 years old. Will someone please tell the Washington foreign policy establishment?
My former boomer neighbors chowed down at least half a million$ of tax money for cardiac bypass surgeries from living an unhealthy lifestyle all paid for by Medicare but they don’t think of that as a “handout” of course.
Basic economic theory shows that UBI will just cause the prices of goods to increase which will make the monthly $1000 pointless. Yang is also planning to raise taxes so there’s also that.
However since the US is in a death spiral, I honestly doubt it matters at this point. With the Republicans essentially gutting the wealth of this country via trillion dollar wars, might as well vote Yang for the lulz.
Why, why do muricans only conceive of taxes as income taxes where the government robs them of their earned wages? There are other ways for the “Government, aka the Leviathan” to force you (us) to fund the common good … the provision of colored paper for us to use as an immediate unit of barter, which must be backed by the police of the State (aka the Government, aka the Leviathan), is a privilege that can “taxed” to fund the police power necessary to make this colored paper have value. The proposed UBI can be easily resourced by imposing a federal sales tax, that is also levied against the trillions of dollar stock and commodities transactions occurring every day among the (((moneychangers))) of NYC and Chicongo. Even a 1% transaction fee would easily generate all the funding needed to fund the UBI and provide employment for all of us displaced by the (((modern economy))).
I also always hear the argument that massive corporations like Amazon would just jump ship and move elsewhere.
But where exactly?
China or Russia? Jeff Bezos and his entire board of directors would be put up against a wall and shot if they tried half the nonsense they pull in Murica.
Cuck Island? Nope. Time for Bezos to shell out to the NHS and other social welfare systems.
Ditto for the rest of Europe.
The Third World? Nope. Even the most greed-driven corporate snake understands it’s White labor that keeps their businesses intact.
I keep hearing that is “welfare.”..This is your brain on conservatism and lolbertarianism
Well, it is welfare. The factories and the manufacturing job are not coming back. Not if you don’t impose stiff tariffs and thus off the imports of cheap-labor products from China, and other third-world but developing economies.
And it is not even new.
In the ancient Roman Republic times the same thing happened as Rome expanded and conquered the Mediterranean basin. First, the citizen-farmers, the class which was the political basis of the democratic republic and also the infantry man of the legions of the Roman republican army, were gradually dispossessed of their small plots and those lands consolidated in big “latifundia” owned by aristocrats and which were worked by the slaves (cheap-labor) captured in those expansionist wars and brought in Italy. And second, after North Africa (Carthage) was conquered, cheap grain started to arrive from those very productive lands (then it was a different climate in N-Africa) and from Egypt and this in turn collapsed further the price of grain in Italy and made it impossible for the individual small farmer to compete, they went bankrupt and sold their land to the aristocrats who were using disposable slaves to work it cheaply.
The dispossession and consolidation of the agricultural land in Italy grew slowly but surely and was already a problem by 133 BC when the “populist” Gracchus brothers agitated land redistribution. It became a problem because a great number of former farmers, full citizens with voting rights and many former soldiers as well, became unemployed men as they lost their lands were wandering through Italy with their families, or they were filling the city of Rome, and were living from begging or odd jobs. The problem only grew in time. It destabilized the politics of the Roman Republic. It also led to the collapse of the republican army as an army made from voluntary and independent citizens (since there were fewer and fewer farmers) and the army became a professional, a paid army, and loyal not the the state but to the generals who paid them. Eventually the Republic collapsed in terrible civil wars, wars fueled in no small measure by the mass of the many unemployed Roman-citizens with little to lose.
Something had to be done to help the many unemployed citizens of the Republic, at least in order to avoid the periodic collapse of the state in civil wars.. First subsidized cheap grain for the poor was introduced and then, a decade later, it was Caesar (43 BC) who introduced the “Yang-1000” formula : free daily grain dole first and later already cooked bread and other ‘benefits’. Once introduced it remained until the end of the Roman Empire in 476 AD.
The US – its elites, its modern day Roman aristocrats- have to do something with the mass of people it has betrayed by outsourcing the US factories (and their competitive technological advantage) to the cheap labor in Asia in the search of a large profits for themselves. At least for the sake of avoiding social unrest as the Romans did. Trump success showed that potential for a social explosion is there.
See also the Gilets Jaunes who have protested violently in France for months now. They are the former French working class, The industrial jobs today in France amount to only some 8%.and the French jobs, the French factories are in Est-Europe or North-Africa, or in China.
It is wellfare. Yang, as Trump, addresses the problems that globalization and cheap-labor immigration have created for US. But Yang is not about system-change, as Trump promised, but about compensating for the problems created and maintaining the present system.
Excellent post. Linking ancient history with current circumstances.
Those who gnore history will be doomed to repeat it..
It was a huge mistake for the USA in the 1960s, to have a national medical programme only for people over age 65, as well as guaranteed income
When the real priority should always be, that people in their 20s, have the earnings and social environment enabling being married and have children … retirees shoud not be neglected but there must always be a compact across the generational lines
Millions of boomers have gotten, and still get, much more in benefits than they ever ‘paid in’ to the system … and yet they sneer at young people unable to get a family foothold in what is now a much harsher American world
In Europe tens of millions of youth are unemployed … and it is being increasingly remembered that, whatever their faults, ‘fascists supported young families’, with jobs and good worker wages
Apparently this Adolf fellow had a programme, where a newly married couple got a modest but valuable loan to help start their household … for each child born, 25% of the loan was forgiven
Our economy cannot be fixed using old models of the 18th,19th & 20th century. As I said to you on twitter, the only jobs that have come to my county since Trump was elected is Dollar General. I roll my eyes every time I hear Trump tards going on about the great economy, They must live outside DC or NoVa or retired living off their stock portfolios. It is not benefiting those large areas of red that voted for Trump in 2016. Rural and small town America continue to get crushed along with our brothers in the Rust belt.
We have Trump who thinks a fantastic trade deal is one where you negotiate for larger profits for soybean farmers. How many jobs can possibly be created growing soybeans? It’s over for conservatism if that is the best they can do.
Trump is the last gasp of this 20th century boomer conservative neo-liberal trickle-down theory. It will not be tried again. Reagan conservatism will have its last hurrah with Trump and then they can prepare to be swept out of national power.
It is now a question as to who will replace them. Personally I prefer Yang over someone like Bernie Sanders. Yang brings fresh new ideas compared to the old stale socialism of the 1950’s and 60’s coming from Bernie that will not work anyway in the 21st century. Raising the minimum wage cannot solve our problems with automation and outsourcing.
Correct.
See Amazon, Target, and Walmart.
Self checkout, slashed hours to the bare legal minimum, and rising healthcare costs.
You’d be left with no other option than to squash these companies with a proverbial jackboot.
Probably not a bad idea, all things considered…
It would appear to me that people working at “Amazon, Target, and Walmart” and etc. are already on welfare. They can’t feed themselves so they are on food stamps and have health care paid for by the State r the hospital, ultimately the State, when they go to the emergency room.
Having a UBI means people can move around and raise their productivity. Sure some will do nothing but they are likely to be doing nothing now.
Trump hurt the soybean farmers. His little tariff war made the Chinese angry and they quit buying our soybeans.
The choice between Socialism and Capitalism … is really the choice between … Community and Usury.
What was often left out of the glowing jobs numbers reports is how few jobs were actually gained by White people. Manufacturing is coming back, but with increased automation. If the economy was doing well, there wouldn’t be so many Dollar Trees (stores where everything’s a dollar) in my part of the country. My friend’s shrinking 401k should be shooting through the roof. If the economy was truly booming for the young, we wouldn’t be reading so much anger towards previous generations.
Social Security was started in an era when people didn’t live as long. It was meant to be a cash cow for gov’t. It was anyway, as the SS trust fund was always robbed by pols. The smart thing would have been to have universal benefits. We were going to have longer vacation periods and shorter work weeks legislated back in the Truman administration, but that was stopped because it was thought that would naturally happen. It happened in Europe, of course, but not here. Safety nets are only tried or improved as a last resort, it seems. As Ovidiu said, it’s about compensating for the problems caused by the current system without changing the system. Which is more proof we’re run by a kakistocracy that doesn’t know shit from shinola. Innovation isn’t their strong suit.