I doubt their motives and their claimed personal experience. The Op looked and smelled like astroturfing.
He was asked to substantiate his claims, name the org he worked for etc, and nothing.
Yeah, it’s even more bogus than the #WalkAway movement, except that white ppl are, in fact, dumb enough to fall for it.
It turns out, though, that that’s another pious libertarian dogma that isn’t actually true in the real world. A comparatively small group of someone-elses having lots more money than you and the rest of us does in fact significantly limit your freedom, by making government less responsive to the non-wealthy and more vulnerable to capture by elite interests. As this article notes,
A small group of someone-elses only has a small group of votes. If the rest of us vote with them against our own interests, that’s our fault.
But even if someone with more money uses it for nefarious purposes, their simply having the money does not harm me.
To quote old Boss Tweed, “I don’t care who does the electing, as long as I get to do the nominating.”
I’m voting for Bernie in the primary, however, whoever wins that has my vote.
Did the same thing with Hillary.
Again, this idealistic libertarian mantra is simply obscuring the realities of cause and effect, in which having extremely disproportionate amounts of wealth significantly increases the someone-elses’ ability to persuade other people to vote against their interests.
This sort of naive delusionality is a hallmark of libertarian thinking. They ignore the very real and predictable negative consequences of the inequities all around them in favor of contemplating the theoretical level playing field that exists only in their own minds.
This likewise shows a tremendously naive willful disregard of reality. The fact is that when a small minority of people have extremely disproportionate amounts of wealth, it is statistically inevitable that some of them will use it to further skew the political system in favor of the wealthy.
I used to have a more naive and laissez-faire view of extreme wealth disparities myself, though from a more liberal standpoint: I opined that as long as the folks at the bottom of the heap were getting adequate resources from tax funding, it didn’t matter at all how much money the folks at the top of the heap had left over.
Then I started to encounter analyses of the run-up to the 2008 economic crash, describing how the development of highly risky derivatives and similar financial instruments was largely due to rapidly bloating investment capital desperate for new market options. Money that in the hands of the much larger non-wealthy population would have been funneled mostly into ordinary consumption, thereby growing markets, was instead recycled into speculative offshoots of existing markets responding to demands for places to put excess money.
That is, the fact that wealth was highly concentrated as excess capital in a relatively small number of hands in and of itself led to bad outcomes. Not necessarily because the individual excessively wealthy people were greedy or cruel. Just because they were in control of too much of the money, and so the normal stabilizing deterrents to financial risk failed to restrain them.
Libertarian pious moralities about the intrinsic neutrality of vast wealth inequality are simply delusions. When small elites of fabulously wealthy people have vastly more money than they need, inevitably large chunks of that money are going to wind up working to make the system more destabilized and unfair for the rest of us, even if the elites aren’t operating with any deliberately “nefarious” purposes.
OK good, we’re on the same page.
Without consumers, businesses have nothing. Ask any bankrupt company.
How should it be determined which regulations are good and which are bad?
I can say what it doesn’t mean, based on their website. It doesn’t mean the government will run everything. It also doesn’t mean that the government will turn into authoritarianism.
Here’s a thread on the US turning into Venezuela on the Dope from 9/18. That’s probably a better place for that discussion.
I did a quick search on whether the US could turn into Venezuela. The only hits that came up were from Fox News. There are a lot of other factors in the Venezuela situation that makes the US too dissimilar to compare.
How would the resolution do massive damage to corporations? It’s just a roadmap in resolution format that wasn’t passed by the Senate.
In his Fox News town hall recently, Bernie mentioned a 52% top marginal tax rate that he was pushing in 2016. He didn’t seem to be pushing one this campaign. AOC made an off-hand comment about a 70% marginal tax rate that started all the controversy. She wasn’t even promoting legislation. I don’t know Elizabeth Warren’s position.
You’re right that I’m not seeing the difference. Here’s a piece of the statement from the wiki on social democracy.
Social democracy has evolved and so has democratic socialism as concepts in the current political climate. I do see a piece in the wiki where they try to make a distinction, but in the most notable section there’s:
Here’s AOC on her take on what it means. She says that she believes in a democratic economy but. . .
AOC: Can You Be A Democratic Socialist And A Capitalist? ‘It’s Possible’ | MTP Daily | MSNBC [youtube]
She explained what she meant by worker cooperatives. She says that workers should have a say in how the corporation they work in should run.
In real terms, wages have been stagnant for decades.
Wage Stagnation in Nine Charts from 2015
Fed Chair Powell grilled on stagnant wage growth in tight job market from Feb 2019
For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades from Pew Research Center August 2018
In U.S., wage growth is being wiped out entirely by inflation from The Washington Post August 2018
Millennials will not be so lucky. If the projections are right, millennials will have less than their parents.
Millennials will be the first generation to earn less than their parents from World Economic Forum July 2016.
That’s probably why workers are so expendable that corporations don’t have to increase their wages (in real terms) for decades. The workers couldn’t do the same on their own, so they have to accept what they’re given.
If the markets are efficient, what’s the explanation for the shrinking middle class? Or is that a result of “too efficient”?
The middle class is shrinking just about everywhere in America in The Washington Post May 2016
America’s incredible shrinking middle class on CBS News March 2015
Shrinking Middle Class Threatens Global Growth, Stability in Wall Street Journal April 19, 2019 (this is behind a paywall, but I thought the title and date was appropriate)
Within that context, the debate about what some people consider to be “humane care” has sometimes left me sad for the future of humanity.
It is indeed a significant amount of money. To put that in context, federal SNAP benefits for 2018 were projected to be $672B without Trump’s proposed cut to $479B.
If the private charity were aggregated, it could almost fund a whole program like SNAP.
Who funds the schools and how much? Who decides the curriculum? :dubious:
What evaluation and critical thinking skills were taught, that people are able to make good and informed decisions?
Dammit, you just gave me a dark vision of the Republican Wet Dream: publicly funded, privately operated schools, where the government covers the basic cost of your child’s education, but, of course, the school operators can offer an upcharge to give your child access to more and better resources.
Can we say, though, that doing massive damage to corporations would be a bad thing? Is our corporate business model the socioeconomic ideal? I know there is widespread of dissatisfaction with corporations and the sometimes detestable ways the act.
Granted, we do not have a viable alternate model that could seamlessly take their place, but I feel like some of the larger ones need to be dismantled and realigned into smaller entities built to function in an environment that is closer to the real world that real people live in. But it would take someone much smarter than me to figure out how to arrange a smooth, secure transition to such a system.