..
Wednesday, December 9th, 2020So, I think various people have talked about how clearly we’re less wealthy than we once were insofar as once a single worker could pay for a entire family to have a house and food and the like, whereas now two workers can barely pay for a family to have a apartment.
I was musing last night that even the most wealthy among us are not winning by my standards. This is not what winning looks like. I *know* what winning looks like – as I’ve said, it’s a bunch of friends and the holodeck. It’s also knowing that everyone that everyone you know knows has food and shelter and isn’t one wrong move away way from losing these things.
Of course, this is part of why I scorn so harshly the republican ideal of “personal responsibility”. We’re not gods, and life has no undo button, so in essence what they are saying is “people with bad luck deserve to starve so people with good luck can have two yachts”. It’s not a way to build a world I want to live in, but unfortunately we’re stuck with these people because they can’t be convinced that they are wrong – they have a religious attachment to their beliefs.
(And, lately, they’re willing to lie, steal, and cheat in order to keep those beliefs controlling the world. The bit about lying about the election having been stolen – and the number of them apparently dumb enough to believe the lie – is depressing. It’s impressive I suppose that Dear Leader is self centered enough to be willing to swing a sledgehammer at the idea of us being one functioning country if it will make him a few more million.)
(I actually had a friend who was gullible enough to believe that Trump wouldn’t need to take any money from people because he already had enough. This is wrong both because for people like Trump there will never be enough and because Trump is in fact upside down and probably owes the russian mob money as well. Anyway, he’s recently collected $200 million claiming it was for preventing election fraud but if you read the fine print it’s to pay down debts)
Anyway, I’ve talked before about how I want a different world – dramatically different – than the religious right and the small government right want. (Of course, ironically, the right is the party of big government – big war machine government in particular). But I also want a different world than the left appears to be championing. It seems like everyone is thinking *way* too small. It’s got to be a sign of something dramatically wrong that someone working full time can no longer afford to rent a apartment, and we really should be demanding that the bankers fix it before they find themselves no longer in control of anything. But instead we’re all pointing fingers at some of the most laughable, most obviously *not* the problem things there are – like immigrants. It takes a special kind of stupid – which unfortunately it seems a large number of people are – to think that immigrants are the problem. It takes not noticing that taxes are not really the problem ,among other things. If we gave that full time minimum wage employee all their taxes back, they still couldn’t afford to rent a apartment. We’ve built a resource allocation system that makes real value disappear.