Is the reason for our current standard of living being better than any time before due to our economic and political structure, or because of modern technology?
Our technology is great. Our economic and political structures, not so much.
Splitting hairs here between “flawed” and “broken.” My 1988 Hyundai went faster than any person on horseback could have gone, a better rate of travel than nearly anyone in history, and yet, its “flaws” meant that it couldn’t get up to highway speeds, so for all practical purposes, was broken.
Should I have accepted that it was better than what anyone had in the past, and even what many have in the present, or should I have replaced it with a car that could participate in the modern transportation network?
Well, you were pretty vague in how you were connecting what you said to what he was warning about, why don’t you make a more specific relation to how your analogy of the FDA relates to his warning?
That’s because @Sam_Stone is a disingenuous fool who is arguing against a proposal that nobody is making. Not Bernie Sanders or AOC or any of the other boogeyman. Nobody wants to “destroy” the capitalist system by seizing the means of production and handing them over to a dictatorship of the proletariat. People are simply proposing regulations. But people like @Sam_Stone pretend that any kind of regulation is a mortal attack on the foundations of the system.
The thing is, none of this is new. You didn’t grow up in the US, but one of those super “classic” events to learn about in US History class is this one:
Safety standards weren’t a “thing” yet, so they’d padlock the exit doors shut to make sure no one stole anything. Factory burned down, and almost 150 people died.
What our high schools tend to gloss over, though, is how this went from yet another tragedy to a landmark event. At the time, the owner was sued for manslaughter, but he easily got off. He even got caught doing the same thing 2 years later and got a $20 fine.
(He was found liable in a civil suit but apparently by the time his insurance company paid him he had made a profit)
The only reason anything changed is that despite plenty of loud voices just like Sam’s arguing that any regulation on these companies would break their backs, trade unions worked hard to push meaningful change through congress.
Most people agree that companies shouldn’t be able to mistreat their employees, or scam their customers, or unsafe dump toxic waste. Most people would be totally fine with their government putting a stop to that sort of thing. Conservatives cannot win that argument by saying “but the most important thing is the bottom line, so screw the rivers and the employees and the customers!”. So instead, they create a false narrative, where ANY attempt to curb the bad behavior THAT EVERYONE CAN SEE IS HAPPENING IN THE NEWS EVERY DAY would destroy businesses and by extension the community and country.
That’s why we don’t accept @Sam_Stone’s argument at face value, but instead challenge the underlying assumptions. IS anyone trying to break the system that’s given us all this wealth? No, they are simply seeking to modify the system so that its outputs don’t all end up in the same place.
The argument that any change to the system would break it for everyone, made by the people drawing the most benefit from the current system, is an argument literally as old as systems themselves.
I already read about it and its significance. And I’m going to leave this subject now, because it’s not what I’m interested in. @Sam_Stone can defend his own comment.
They define “sealioning” as “A disparaging term for the confrontational practice of leaping into an online discussion with endless demands for answers and evidence .” … Sealioning thus works both to exhaust a target’s patience, attention, and communicative effort, and to portray the target as unreasonable.
How asking a rhetorical question and then saying I don’t want to pursue the subject further fits this definition is quite the mystery…
You can take your Hyundai to the shop, You can replace it with a 2021 Hyundai which, while more advanced, is functionally similar to your old car. You can even buy a Tesla if you want - its propulsion is different, but other than that, it’s still basically a car. I’d recommend against buying an experimental fusion-powered autogiro that has never actually flown outside of controlled laboratory conditions and has never even seen a highway, though. Or something.
Umm… metaphors. Sorry.
Anyway. Capitalism: flawed. Socialism: also flawed. A careful, constantly adjusted balance between the two: probably a good idea.
To extend the flawed metaphor, there are a variety of politicians advocating for taking the car into the shop, asking your brother the mechanic for help, or getting the same aftermarket modifications that your Swedish cousin has been raving about; and there is a different group of politicians claiming that all the politicians in the first group are dangerous radicals who want us to burn our car and start hitchhiking.
Criticizing @Sam_Stone for falling into the second category doesn’t mean we support hitchhiking.
???! Uh, except for all the poverty rates in other developed nations that are better than one in seven? For example, the Netherlands’ poverty rate of 8.8 percent, meaning that fewer than one in eleven Dutch people live in poverty.
We can recognize that poverty rates in the US are lower than in many less fortunate countries without resorting to silly exaggerations about “best in human history” that are flatly contradicted by the facts.
I’d imagine that @Alessan’s point isn’t about the US specifically, but about developed nations today as a whole. 1 in 7 and 1 in 11 are basically the same thing when compared to feudal societies or empires, for example.
So 1 in 7 is “broken”, and 1 in 11 is fine? Those rates seem so close to me so as to be basically the same, at least compared to the 9 out of 10 poverty rate 150 years ago.
I’m not American. I don’t think the American system is perfect - in fact, I think my own country’s economic system, which has its own spectacular set of flaws, is still better than the American one. I just think that terms like “broken” shouldn’t be thrown around so freely, especially when talking about capitalism as a whole.
Where do we draw the line between “basically the same thing” and “not the same thing”, though? The US’s poverty rate of 1 in 7 is worse than the Dutch 1 in 11, but better than, say, Israel’s 1 in 5, all of which are way better than, say, India’s 2 in 3.
So where is the line where the “best” poverty rate stops being “best”? 1 in 4? 1 in 3? 1 in 2? (That 1 in 2 rate is about where the US was 150 years ago, btw, nowhere near as bad as the contemporary world average of about 9 in 10.)
The thing that is broken about capitalism is the assumption that it can take care of everyone’s needs. It excels at matching unlimited wants to limited recourses, but fails in ensuring that everyone has what they need.
It is poor at policing its own externalities, and in prioritizing the wants of the wealthy over the needs of the less fortunate.
To acknowledge this flaw is not to dismiss capitalism for what it is good at, it is to reduce the harm it does in the areas that it is not good at.
“Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor – at least no one worth speaking of.”
Douglas Adams
Probably the better question is what is the best way to improve poverty rates. Both wealth and good social policy are necessary. Israel has a lower GDP per capita than the USA so increasing wealth might be the key there, while in the US a better social safety net is needed.
The Netherlands is a rich country (although not as rich as the US) and also has good social policies.
A search of the thread finds that bill door did say that our system is broken, so I guess that is what is being referred to.
Of course, that same search also shows that sam has said that our schools are broken, so, by the same logic that says that anyone who points out flaws in capitalism wants to abolish capitalism, I assume that means that he wants to abolish education.
