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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26564 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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A parasitical relationships between the producers of wealth, the managers and the oppressed/activist class, who can rearrange the chairs to receive more money, prestige and wealth.

American society used to have a much larger distaste for money being wasted in this kind of corrupt way. However, as taxes increased and government grew, the focus on economy fell by the wayside and it became a lot easier for these sorts of cash flows to just disappear in the torrent of Federal spending.

When would you draw the line?

The Gilded Age was notoriously corrupt, often in the exact way you describe. Before that, there were the sinecures of Jacksonian democracy. In the interim, we saw the country split in half, developing a duplicate bureaucracy and army specifically to protect a managerial class.

I don’t think the project has ever risen above those human, tribal tendencies.

But the thing about all the grift and corruption in the gilded age was that it was guys saying things like "this town will die if you don't build a road out here" or "Give me the permits for this hotel or I'll shoot you" or "I'm going to a build a library in every town in America and you'll have to put me in jail to try to stop me"

That's societally beneficial grift

But to answer your question it seems obvious to me democracy in and of itself was a mistake if the first thing we did was raise an army to fight against veterans of the revolutionary war and we didn't even make it 100 years without a civil war. The Romans had 400 years of republic before their first real civil war, and we think we know better (lol)

Some of it, sure. Other parts were garden-variety and embezzlement and obstruction. Calling that “societally beneficial” is like judging the Soviet Union only by its number of tanks.

As for the Romans—half their early conflicts were rebellions; they just hadn’t got around to calling their socii “Romans” yet. But by a stricter standard, the first Roman equivalent to the Whiskey Rebellion happened in 495. Well, it’s marginally longer than our record!

All of that was still considered corruption back then, and was occasionally punished.

Now it's considered normal.

American society used to have a much larger distaste for money being wasted in this kind of corrupt way.

I think societal norms and character of a people play a bigger role in outcomes than people tend to think. Our turn to welfare spending following the great depression changed pretty dramatically how people relate to the government, and it is bad.

Is this federal money? My impression around Silicon Valley is that this is much more likely to be VCs/grifting startups spending pensioners money on pointless marketing events like this.

It's both, plus state money. Plus, the big foundations that finance a lot of this receive favorable tax treatment to pretend to be charities.

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