Okey doke, no worries then.
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Serious The Politics Thread
- Thread starter Oglemi
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Alright multiple people asked me for my opinion on economics. Essentially, the Republican economic system, in "my" opinion, makes the most sense. For those of you who don't know, it is basically giving companies incentives to create more jobs, and more jobs is the basis for a good economy. Now, normally I wouldn't recommend you take advice from an idiot 17 year old on the internet, and this still applies. You should not take economic advice from me. You should, however, take economic advice from my mom. My mom has a masters in economics, and gives advice on the economy for a living. The reason I put my in quotes when referring to my opinion is that it isn't really my opinion. I don't have any good opinions. My mom however, is quite literally an expert, so I am inclined to agree with her, and what she says makes sense.
In general the "economy" doing well does not directly translate to the "people" doing well. You could lower the shit out of taxes on the rich and corporations, and instead increase them on the poor / middle class and... yeah GDP would probably go up. But the average person would suffer. Trickle down Republican style economics do what you say but for the average person it doesn't work quite as well.
Or as an easier comparison, the economy under Biden has been doing excellent. But the prices of housing, food, and so on have skyrocketed while wages have stagnated. Is the economy doing well? Yes. The people? Not so much.
Edit: to clarify I'm not saying "capitalism bad, eat the rich" but more that balance is important and right now shit isn't very balanced.
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well I don't think it's about "what people are there", it's what people it attracts systemically. Anonymity naturally will bring in the worst people, and they will drive out most normal people.
Like yeah, you don't know my name, but there is a profile of my posting on this website and I could be directly banned. With full anonymity it's just whatever goes.
Every anonymous messageboard that doesn't have a crazy amount of moderation will devolve into 4chan.
The problem is that in capitalism, companies do not exist to create jobs and are not interested in doing so, at least not after a certain point. Maybe very small local and rather informal companies do, but once you reach a certain point, your main interest is to gain exponential profit to your owners and your investors, which includes cutting down on jobs when needed and keeping wages and benefits low. Especially if you go the libertarian way of no state control, which means companies are even more incentivized to do below the bare minimum for someone to survive, because why wouldn't they? People are numbers and so is their costs, and you want to keep costs low and profits high.
100% agree.
Trickle down economics doesn’t work, you need to change the structure and how it removes cash from the poorest and reduces what it takes from the richest.
Eg savings accounts.
In the uk savings account have this thing whereby you earn more interest at higher rates if you have more in the bank. And that’s fine, it’s an incentive by the bank to get people to save more and to attract richer savers.
Except that the different in the interest rates can be as much as 10%.
So if you have under £100,000 you’d get an interest rate of 1.2% currently, if you had over £100,000 you’d get 11.2% currently.
Basically the vast chasm between haves and have nots is endemic, and only getting worse - there are other examples of which taxation of corporations, off shore accounts, etc, is not working in everyone’s benefits.
I’m not advocating for redistribution of wealth by a massive uprising: I am asking for the structures we have to be changed to prevent a complete lop sided and legal taking of money from the 99% and giving it to the 1%.
Here are some problems with Capitalism from an ethical and philosophical standpoint:
1. Human Nature Is Made For Cooperation
Turns out, you don't actually need to make good products to get people to buy things. You can manipulate them with advertising, FOMO, word of mouth, spreading false information, and more. While there are still valid reasons to buy an iPhone, people thinking an Apple product is inherently higher-quality and more innovative than an Android Phone is entirely marketing, but it works. Scams and bad apples have always existed in humanity, but we have evolved as social creatures and thus think like social creatures. This is extremely easy for advertising to manipulate on a scale never seen before.
2. Profit
Profit itself is derived from taking value from workers. Even beyond the scope of companies, this is why every major nation in the world has basically gotten there through using a civilian population to create profit and wealth, at the expense of them. We see this growth with countries like China that went from exploiting their own, letting foreign companies pay them next to nothing in order to create wealth for the nation, to now exploiting nations in Africa to continue making wealth as they invest more into their own people. In America, we used slavery, obviously. Britain? Basically, had most of the world under its thumb, etc.
Companies do this, actually directly, but even for the people that aren't directly enslaved the profit motive creates a system where people with capital can subordinate people, especially poor people. From the labor, they collect profit, which is the value of the labor. If the worker takes the parts to make a product that costs the company $0.50, the shipping takes $0.20, and the product costs $3.50, while the worker is making usually cents per item generally, the company is making obscene profit from the value that only the worker provided.
The worker is the person who put in the time and effort to take the parts and turn it into the product, the worker is who shipped the product to the store, and the worker is the person at the store who kept the store functioning for it to be sold. But instead of these workers making the actual money earned from their labor, the company, the owner of the means of production, makes the vast majority of the money.
3. Political Power
Because monetary value = power in our countries, companies like Amazon that straight up make more money than entire countries have tons of political power. It shouldn't be a surprise then that they are easily able to use that economic power to put their demands and get around economic demands set from countries, such as America, in order to provide the least they possibly can for society and retain power.
Companies become providers of service where their motive is not to help the people but to take from them. The private prison industry for instance. Most of these prisons get paid more the more people they have jailed, which on the surface, for two seconds, makes a bit of sense. More prisoners, more work, more labor, more compensation from state governments. However, this spawns the incentive for a major lobbying force to increase police spending, increase what constitutes as a crime (and a crime that should result in jailtime), increase the terror in people around crime as a whole. Keep people locked up, away from their families. In the worst cases? Using prisoners as a labor force to create more value while lobbying to keep people in jail for longer and longer.
4. Environmentalism
Do I even need to explain this one? Exxon basically knew about climate change for decades before most scientists, and kept it quiet. Oil and gas companies fight constantly to keep their spot despite how bad they are for our very Earth. The march of profit does not stop because "the world as we know it might end", or whatever.
1. Human Nature Is Made For Cooperation
Turns out, you don't actually need to make good products to get people to buy things. You can manipulate them with advertising, FOMO, word of mouth, spreading false information, and more. While there are still valid reasons to buy an iPhone, people thinking an Apple product is inherently higher-quality and more innovative than an Android Phone is entirely marketing, but it works. Scams and bad apples have always existed in humanity, but we have evolved as social creatures and thus think like social creatures. This is extremely easy for advertising to manipulate on a scale never seen before.
2. Profit
Profit itself is derived from taking value from workers. Even beyond the scope of companies, this is why every major nation in the world has basically gotten there through using a civilian population to create profit and wealth, at the expense of them. We see this growth with countries like China that went from exploiting their own, letting foreign companies pay them next to nothing in order to create wealth for the nation, to now exploiting nations in Africa to continue making wealth as they invest more into their own people. In America, we used slavery, obviously. Britain? Basically, had most of the world under its thumb, etc.
Companies do this, actually directly, but even for the people that aren't directly enslaved the profit motive creates a system where people with capital can subordinate people, especially poor people. From the labor, they collect profit, which is the value of the labor. If the worker takes the parts to make a product that costs the company $0.50, the shipping takes $0.20, and the product costs $3.50, while the worker is making usually cents per item generally, the company is making obscene profit from the value that only the worker provided.
The worker is the person who put in the time and effort to take the parts and turn it into the product, the worker is who shipped the product to the store, and the worker is the person at the store who kept the store functioning for it to be sold. But instead of these workers making the actual money earned from their labor, the company, the owner of the means of production, makes the vast majority of the money.
3. Political Power
Because monetary value = power in our countries, companies like Amazon that straight up make more money than entire countries have tons of political power. It shouldn't be a surprise then that they are easily able to use that economic power to put their demands and get around economic demands set from countries, such as America, in order to provide the least they possibly can for society and retain power.
Companies become providers of service where their motive is not to help the people but to take from them. The private prison industry for instance. Most of these prisons get paid more the more people they have jailed, which on the surface, for two seconds, makes a bit of sense. More prisoners, more work, more labor, more compensation from state governments. However, this spawns the incentive for a major lobbying force to increase police spending, increase what constitutes as a crime (and a crime that should result in jailtime), increase the terror in people around crime as a whole. Keep people locked up, away from their families. In the worst cases? Using prisoners as a labor force to create more value while lobbying to keep people in jail for longer and longer.
4. Environmentalism
Do I even need to explain this one? Exxon basically knew about climate change for decades before most scientists, and kept it quiet. Oil and gas companies fight constantly to keep their spot despite how bad they are for our very Earth. The march of profit does not stop because "the world as we know it might end", or whatever.
and that is why you need to give them incentives to do so. This isn't trickle down economics, this isn't handing money to companies and hoping they distribute it to the poor. this is promising companies benefits, such as money or tax breaks, if they create jobs.
/pol/ was created specifically as a containment board for Nazis who were shitting up other boards because moot felt that banning people who think Hitler was right went against 4chan's ideal of free speech. Smogon moderation does not have this problem, so I don't think this is really a good comparison.
Putting fewer checks on corporations and allowing them to aggressively expand (which is essentially the Republican economic platform) may create more jobs in certain situations (e.g. allowing oil companies to drill more aggressively may lead to them hiring more people to man those projects), but corporations are profit-seeking entities that will always seek to minimize the number of people who need to be paid (and how much each person gets paid) in the long term. Getting them to not do that whenever possible requires the kind of government regulation to which Republicans are staunchly opposed (on paper, anyway).
Likely with the burden of intense trauma, similar to facebook content moderators. There’s also past journalists who cover wars, sex trafficking and other horrors that have legitimate PTSD. That’s certainly an under-discussed aspect of this, this is the first real horror to take place in the social media age (ie, think if the Rwandan genocide was broadcast in a similar manner), and how that impacts the psyches of people whose personal SM algorithm is reinforcing the horror. This is not to say never watch the news, and more accessibility to on-the-ground news is generally a good thing, but it’s important to take breaks and detox.
sounds like the republicans accidentally came up with a good policy while trying to make corporations more powerful and then were dedicated to making sure that as little good things come from that as possible.
You effectively cannot give companies enough incentives to carve into their number one goal, profit making, without eventually just giving into their demands.
No matter what, foreign slave labor wage work will always be in a company's better interest than a real livable wage. Since the corporate tax rate was in the ~60% mark decades ago, we have continuously tried to offer these "incentives" to bring companies back home, and while it may create some American jobs in the short term, the demands being given into are things like you said, tax breaks which companies do not need (look at how many companies since covid have had their best quarter... EVERY quarter.) The other primary method of bringing back jobs has been absolutely guttering the corporate tax rate from that 60% all the way down to 17% with Trump wanting to cut them MORE. And despite literally cutting their tax rate in third, they continue to threaten to leave for slave labor countries unless we cut their taxes even more.
I too have studied Economics in college, and my Marketing degree certainly isn't a Masters in Economics, but the problem with using solely economic theory and models in a real world is that it ignores the very real conditions which cause people to act outside models that cannot perfectly predict everything, or alternatively people in power weaponizing that power so that the natural ebbs and flows of markets somehow somehow never seem to actually negatively impact them (think insane fed buyback in the trillions as covid started to let all the investors make a mad dash out of the market or creating safety nets which they can use but not the average person). Even if economic models were completely perfect, they still are abstracted when applied to our complex lives and social dynamics, and that abstraction has clearly been manufactured to help those with preexisting wealth.
I could even go into how conservatism as an ideology was not some meritocracy as is peddled now, but rather a necessity for the then noble ruling class to redefine why they have power (no no, see, I don't have power over you because of my BLOOD, I have power over you because of my WEALTH ((ignore that the venn diagram between people who had noble/royal blood and those who had wealth around the time of social revolutions is basically a flat circle)), but I'm more interested in tackling the economic points than just blanket going "see it's rotten to the core"
So as to not double post, piggybacking on the last one, I do want to note that Republicans didn't accidentally happen upon a good policy. As stated, deregulation will always have SOME short term positive effects. After all, you just did them a solid, so they're likely investing SOMETHING back, but the thing is you yourself stated Republicans intentionally do this in a way that as little good comes of it as possible. They are well aware that deregulation will lead to companies having more money, and thus, more power. They know that, as soon as that plant is made on American soil, the factory will then run on the exact type of principles which will aim to give workers the least value for their work while giving owners the most, whether that be by stagnating wages, aiming to reduce costs by using worse inputs, limiting the amount of employees to the bare minimum or even less than what is required for safe processes, etc. Deregulation may have some immediate short term benefits, but know that the people on top have the same goals regardless, make number go up at any cost.
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also a lot of the biggest job-creators are making shitty jobs with little job security that usually just preys upon the poor, sucking their souls out while paying them little
Oh hey, my mother also happens to have a background as a chartered accountant. Welcome to the club!
In all seriousness, while I do appreciate one of the few non-Socialist economic posts on this entire site, I don't think we needed an entire paragraph to explain away what is effectively the competitive market, while the rest of us boil down to 'muh trickle-down'. The creation of wealth while we all move in and out of higher income brackets should really just be a natural thing - so the real problem with trickle-down economics is the attempt by institutions to formalise it, rather than allowing it's cultivation to exist without comment. There's a reason why designations of Capitalism shouldn't really be attributed to Republicans and especially not Democrats (I.E: don't credit the uniparty for this) - because any form of central governmental body fundamentally misses the point by over-regulating the economy, and choking out smaller businesses.
And before anyone says 'but lobby groups for deregulation' - technically they aren't. They only lobby for regulation that big businesses can afford, private, public or otherwise. It's not the concept of deregulation that is the issue - it's how it's applied.
I don't agree with trickle-down economics or deregulation for many of the reasons already articulated by others so I won't really go into that, but what I will point out is that these economic policies had a lot of bipartisan support especially during the Reagan years. In other words, you don't have to consider yourself a Republican to agree with them, plenty of Democrats and various independents did (and still do), for better or worse.
EDIT: Libertarians will really shit on socialists for saying that ML dictatorships weren't really socialist and then tell us the problem with Reaganomics is that we were doing it wrong lol.
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I've taken economics classes and I'm still a socialist because the very framework idea that "capitalists will compete with each other to make better products" relies on:
and this
and also that profit itself would be a good concept
this not being the case, but unfortunately it is
and this
and also that profit itself would be a good concept
I wouldn't say I am a straight up socialist but economics classes have made me realize that Economic liberalism is propping itself up by blind ideology and by being the ones who (unsurpisingly) get funding. The actual theories are neglectful of larger societal frameworks, either lack proof or have been straight up disproven and fail to consider human behavior
Some of the pillars of it are true, but there's a very strict refusal due to ideological (and monetary) compromises that don't allow liberal Economism to reach a point of being grounded through properly conducted science. There's a reason why different schools of thought are based largely in what was discovered in the last 100-120 years, whilst Economic liberalism is based on unproven (sometimes unprovable) statements made by people 200-300 years ago whose words came before the term Economy was even in use
That's kind of the problem with waving around a degree in economics or marketing (or your mother's degrees for that matter....). Economics courses in neolib countries are not unbiased hard science programs rooted firmly in stats and analytics like people who often haven't even taken one like to pretend. They're framed through the lens of liberal economic theories and usually assume the principles of those theories to be correct without substantiation and often in the face of contradictory evidence. An economics degree at best teaches you how to succeed in a liberal capitalist economy, not why that system is superior to all other alternatives. That latter part is often simply presupposed, and if any attempt to substantiate it is made, it's generally the same tired 'venezuela no iphone 100 billion dead' arguments dressed up in a more academic veneer.
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We've read some text by David Ricardo in an econ class and when I asked my prof why we need to source every statement we make as academics when Ricardo's statements are just taken as facts without a single source being cited. He said he'll answer that later. Never answered
It's such a limited view of things that reduces circumstances until you reach a point where you can argue that you're right
I apologize on behalf of the OU moderation team. We did not predict that locking the OU thread would lead to him simply moving here.
Please carry on with your normal discussion. Thanks.
Please carry on with your normal discussion. Thanks.
Meanwhile on my holiday abroad I’ve overheard a group of Americans discussing how inconvenient the Israel war (no mention of Palestine or Palestinians) is to their holiday plans. They simply couldn’t abide the air raid sirens.
This was an actual conversation, I wish I had recorded it, I wish I was making it up.
I said nothing out of fear of being ostracised at my hotel for offering up the opinion that the woman so concerned with her holiday plans could shove her opinion up her [censored]
This was an actual conversation, I wish I had recorded it, I wish I was making it up.
I said nothing out of fear of being ostracised at my hotel for offering up the opinion that the woman so concerned with her holiday plans could shove her opinion up her [censored]
Even ignoring the post's contents, someone replying to anything with "muh dogwhistle" like they've living in 2014 freshly sloughed off of kotakuinaction is so immediately disqualifying it gives n1n1 invoking qanon vocabulary a run for its money.
if you're poor and you don't like your job just spend months applying to other shitty jobs with zero chance for upwards mobility what is your actual choice
Even if you thought that was a real, consensual choice, there's on top of that the fact that even low-middle class people are usually < 2 weeks away from homelessness.
Even if you thought that was a real, consensual choice, there's on top of that the fact that even low-middle class people are usually < 2 weeks away from homelessness.
I'd like to know why my post was deleted.
EDIT: To be clear, I think there's plenty of room for a discussion about what consent means in an economic context and whether or not it's possible within a capitalist framework, and the strengths and weaknesses of LTV and STV, how each can be improved, and whether the latter is actually incompatible with non-capitalist economic systems. Even if the guy I was responding to is banned, I think there should have been an opportunity for other people to participate in those discussions, if they were so inclined. If you wanted to edit out my jab at the content creator they linked to, fair enough, but deleting the whole post feels heavy-handed to me.
EDIT: To be clear, I think there's plenty of room for a discussion about what consent means in an economic context and whether or not it's possible within a capitalist framework, and the strengths and weaknesses of LTV and STV, how each can be improved, and whether the latter is actually incompatible with non-capitalist economic systems. Even if the guy I was responding to is banned, I think there should have been an opportunity for other people to participate in those discussions, if they were so inclined. If you wanted to edit out my jab at the content creator they linked to, fair enough, but deleting the whole post feels heavy-handed to me.
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