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What Killed the Middle Class?
rgdot:
:huh:
The middle class discussion and how it is being decimated is exactly due to problems created by those mentioned in the so called biased posts. If people choose to ignore one of the main reasons for the problems brought up by OP then it is little surprise we are at this point.
IainB:
@rgdot:
:huh:
The middle class discussion and how it is being decimated is exactly due to problems created by those mentioned in the so called biased posts. If people choose to ignore one of the main reasons for the problems brought up by OP then it is little surprise we are at this point.
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-rgdot (April 03, 2016, 10:41 AM)
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That does not seem to follow. The OP represents a perspective from economic history (refer to the links for the details thereof), with no reference to the responsibility or significance of, or polarisation with any present-day actors of any specific political party (or not that I am aware of, at any rate).
That history shows long-term trends at work. For example, there has essentially been a move from State A income distribution as a percentage of GDP, to State B. This had occurred over several decades.
So, it would seem unlikely that one could associate the names of recent/current/prospective future POTUSes or senators with this decades-long trend, but yet you say these things are "...exactly due to problems created by those mentioned in the so called biased posts".
I do not understand this reasoning, because those POTUSes or senators cannot reach back in time and claim to have altered events decades in the past.
IainB:
Capitalism is not the system of the past; it is the system of the future—if mankind is to have a future. Those who wish to fight for it, must discard the title of “conservatives.” “Conservatism” has always been a misleading name, inappropriate to America. Today, there is nothing left to “conserve”: the established political philosophy, the intellectual orthodoxy, and the status quo are collectivism. Those who reject all the basic premises of collectivism are radicals in the proper sense of the word: “radical” means “fundamental.” Today, the fighters for capitalism have to be, not bankrupt “conservatives,” but new radicals, new intellectuals and, above all, new, dedicated moralists.
— Ayn Rand
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xtabber:
Capitalism is not the system of the past; it is the system of the future—if mankind is to have a future. Those who wish to fight for it, must discard the title of “conservatives.” “Conservatism” has always been a misleading name, inappropriate to America. Today, there is nothing left to “conserve”: the established political philosophy, the intellectual orthodoxy, and the status quo are collectivism. Those who reject all the basic premises of collectivism are radicals in the proper sense of the word: “radical” means “fundamental.” Today, the fighters for capitalism have to be, not bankrupt “conservatives,” but new radicals, new intellectuals and, above all, new, dedicated moralists.
— Ayn Rand
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-IainB (April 04, 2016, 06:17 AM)
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“Equality may demand the restraint of the liberty of those who wish to dominate; liberty — without some modicum of which there is no choice and therefore no possibility of remaining human as we understand the word — may have to be curtailed to make way for social welfare, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, to leave room for the liberty of others, to allow justice or fairness to be exercised.”
-- Isaiah Berlin
If you really want to see where Ayn Rand's philosophy leads, try moving to Honduras, or read The Space Merchants by Pohl and Kornbluth.
MOUSER!!! Please move this thread to the basement before we all need to don our tin hats!
IainB:
@xtabber: I think you might have misunderstood or misinterpreted some of the points I had made earlier. If so, then it may be that I caused confusion by not being clear enough.
To better understand a puzzle, one needs to look at it from all angles.
I was not quoting Ayn Rand as a polemical statement, but merely to encourage discussion by putting a valid and interesting point of view - not actually my own POV (I don't really have one and am apolitical, as I have learned from De Bono how to avoid the pitfalls there).
Though I have read some of Ayn Rand's books, I personally have never fully understood the rationale of her particular religio-political ideology, nor of some of her statements, but I do consider that one could make make some kind of sense of them if one explained her likely paradigm as having been formed by and during her experiences of communist Russia and her intellectual rejection of and rebellion against the prevailing religio-political ideology there. I mean, at a guess, that could explain things, though one could never know for sure.
However, I don't see that the statement that I quoted from Ayn Rand - though it might sound great - necessarily stands up, given what we know now. For example, here I would repeat what I wrote above:
If the system is broken now (and that would arguably seem to be the case), then we have been presumably unable to stop this rot since at least the '60s, thus, advocating more of the selfsame capitalist religio-political ideology as a solution doesn't really seem entirely rational to me - I mean, it surely seems to be a non sequitur ("it does not follow") at least.
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-IainB (March 28, 2016, 12:43 AM)
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Not trying to labour the point, but, if the system is broken (and it seems to be), and if we desire the objective of an egalitarian society (which I would strongly support, if only for ethical reasons), then we evidently do not currently have a vector moving us towards such an objective (QED) - in fact, the vector would seem to be diverging from that objective (QED). That is always assuming that we are using the correct/appropriate economic statistics - I can't see any fault in them, anyway, but maybe someone else can show them to be wrong.
In the UK and in the USA, The Establishment and The 1% would seem to be inextricably intertwined/interdependent. How did it get that way?
* (a) In the UK: it arguably got that way due to the country's peculiar historical development over some hundreds of years - in fact, I consider the British history and its class system to have formed a monstrous millstone around the nation's neck, inhibiting its socio-economic development towards an egalitarian society.
As Tony Wedgewood Benn so succinctly put it:
What Killed the Middle Class?
* (b) In the USA: it arguably got that way over a much shorter span of time (since the '60s), due to the country's peculiar constitution.
A good example of what seems to have been happening to the country to cause this is arguably shown by this Venn diagram:
What Killed the Middle Class?
I mentioned the Philippines above. That nation was previously under the dominion of Spain (which its why it was still about 98% Roman Catholic in the early '90s), and the Spanish authority administered to it by appointing the chiefs of the 5 or 6 largest tribes as "barons" and to collect taxes, etc.. These ruling families became extremely powerful as a result. When the USA bought the Philippines off the Spanish, it became the US's 1st and only colony - it was a form of economic colonialism. Presumably because it worked, the Americans continued the Spanish administration via the ruling families, which by the 80s had become huge corporations owned by the families, and they effectively run the country in the background today, with the political structure apparently more or less under their control - this is a bit of a potted summary from reading an economic history (a doctoral thesis) of the country from a few years ago. Apparently, the Philippines is one of the few remaining places in the world where a feudal system is still in operation. The result is that a relatively large proportion of Filipino families continue to exist in a state of grinding poverty today, with no end in sight, and it is apparently much less than 1% that take to themselves and control the bulk of the country's wealth.
I worked in the Philippines for about a year as an independent IT and management consultant managing projects for the two major telcos, and my roles required me to take delegated authority for financial budgets and hiring personnel (mostly degree-qualified programmers and analysts). The thing that appalled me was how little these people were paid in IT, when they could earn 10 times as much in IT if they went to (say) Australia or the USA on a work permit (and that's what a lot of them do now, and send their savings back home to their families).[/list]
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