When it comes to the spicier cultural issues that generate flame wars online, I tend to find myself falling on the side of the conservatives. The exceptions to this are LGBT rights and drug use, but these days, these issues seem to divide more on old/young lines than conservative/liberal lines anyway.
I'm strongly against all forms of gun control. I believe that nations often have the responsibility to get involved in the affairs of other nations, including militarily. My diet consists mostly of red meat and I have a longstanding beef with vegans. I find media that overtly panders to minorities irritating whether or not I'm in said minority. I believe that wealthy liberals are intentionally and maliciously fanning the flames of race and gender conflicts to break down community bonds to make people easier to manipulate. Yadda yadda.
In short, when it comes to cultural views, I'm a milquetoast example of exactly what you'd expect to find from a young, online, cultural conservative, or at least libertarian.
And yet, despite all of this, I'm a Socialist. Not a Socialist-lite or Social Democrat in the vein of Bernie Sanders, but a dyed-in-the-wool Socialist.
I believe corporations are fundamentally evil to the core. I believe the overwhelming majority of working people in the US (and probably the world) are being ruthlessly exploited by a class of nobles we'd all be better off without. As a result, I believe we have an ethical responsibility to favor trade unions, strikes, and literally anything that protects workers from corporations. I believe the only realistic long-term result of unchecked Capitalism with rapidly improving technology is a dystopia. Yadda yadda.
Now, neither my cultural beliefs nor my economic beliefs are particularly unusual. The proportion of people in the US identifying as an Economic Leftists or Socialists has gone up every year since 1989, and the cultural conservatives, reactionaries, anti-progs, and anti-woke types are growing rapidly as well. Yet, I've never met anyone else in the overlap.
The combination of cultural Conservatism and economic Socialism is what's historically been called Populism, so that's how I'll be using that word. (I'm clarifying this because some people call Trump a "populist", but he's about as anti-socialist as someone can be, so I'm not using that word the same way as these people.)
Looking to the past, I can see lots of examples of this kind of Populism, especially in the first half of the 20th century, but practically nothing in the present. Libertarians are culturally liberal and economically conservative, and there's loads of them, so you'd think the opposite would also be true, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
With this in mind, I have 3 questions for this community:
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Why are there drastically fewer Populists today than there were in the past?
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Besides "Populist", what are some other names for the belief system I'm describing?
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Where are all the Populists that are left? I assume there's not literally zero, and that some of them hang out online together somewhere, so where are they? Are there populist blogs? Populist forums? Populist subreddits?
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Notes -
The parents may consider it good, but I don't think even the most hardcore anarcho-capitalists would argue that it's fair, any more than it's fair that some people are born kings and some are born peasants.
I mean yeah that's kinda the idea. If I believe that it's bad for people to accumulate large quantities of wealth, then it follows that I would want to disincentivize that.
I mean I wouldn't be much of a Socialist if I didn't believe in getting rid of private property to some extent, but personally, I'm less concerned about the stuff you keep around the house and more the sort of thing that 99% of people would never be able to buy, like factories, refineries, large swaths of land and such.
Let's use a refinery as an example. Ideally, the refinery would be owned by the collective of everyone who works there. The decisions would be made by an individual elected by majority vote every few years.
This just sounds like another way of saying that because he has money, he doesn't have to work like the rest of us. This is what I have a problem with.
I don't disagree with this. Hell, half of what I post online is just variations of this exact statement. I'm very supportive of co-ops and the like. Just because I don't like Capitalism doesn't mean I'm unwilling to work within it. I'm no doomer.
I agree. That's why I'm not a huge fan of wealthy people taking things created by workers.
That seems uncharitable. I want to avoid making this sort of agreement in the first place.
I've heard the risk argument before and I've never bought it, mostly because taking a large quantity of risks is statistically equivalent to taking no risk. If you bet on one horse, you might go broke, but if you bet on 100 horses, you're virtually guaranteed to win a few. The gambling analogy isn't great because the average expected return is always negative, which isn't the case in investment. This is why virtually every extremely rich person has most of their money in investments, and why even the most risk-averse financial advisors support this.
If there's a job that doesn't have its productivity improved by automation, I haven't discovered it yet. Even the softest of social sciences benefit from automating routine paperwork.
I would add food to your list as well.
In other words, the things we don't need are getting cheaper and the things we do need are getting more expensive. The logical extreme of this sounds like a world where we're all constantly distracting ourselves from the fact that we're unhealthy, sick, and constantly at risk of homelessness, which feels very familiar.
When I say "difficult to put objective value on", I'm not talking about everything that could possibly be subjectively valued. I'm talking about things that are virtually impossible to value as they have no minimum value, like art.
Do I think they do nothing? No. Do I think they do enough to justify making triple what the people working for them make? Also no.
Also, while I've known a few lazy workers, most of them at least did enough work to look productive. I've known drastically more lazy managers who literally sat on their phones all day scrolling twitter.
As a final note, you seem to think I take issue with the existence of transactions, but I have no problem with these. If Peter has a million dollars and Paul has zero, and Peter pays Paul to perform services. I don't care about that transaction. I take issue with the fact that Peter has a million dollars and Paul has zero in the first place.
Imagine I work at ExxonMobil. Someone runs for election with the platform "retire now!". They gain control, sell the $206B in net assets, and give each of the 62300 employees a $3.3 million lump of cash.
Why wouldn't that happen to every company with low labor requirements? Would you just add a few million useless jobs to bring the shares down below retirement levels (actually, below time-to-find-a-new-job levels)? Require a buy-in from all new employees?
"Owned by everyone who works there" is probably not the best way I could have phrased it. What I'm picturing looks something like this, quoted from another comment:
Suppose you live in a town of 10000 people and you and 30 buddies believe that your town would be better off with a power plant.
In a Captialist economy, you'd all go to a wealthy investor and try to convince him of your hypothetical plant's ability to make him a lot of money if he invests in it. If you succeed, he'd fund your plant in exchange for most of the profits. This could be described as an investor-owned business.
In a Socialized economy, you'd all go to the town council to convince them that the plant would be a net positive for the town. The council would hold a vote of the entire town. If the vote passed, the town would fund your plant in exchange for a cut of the profits, which would be distributed to the people, either directly or through infrastructure. This would be a collective-owned (government-owned) business.
The advantage of this over an investor-owned business is that it scales better with automation. Suppose that the plant initially hires 50 people from the town. Then suppose, as is common, that improvements in technology enable the plant to be only manned by 10 people. Then suppose that all other businesses in the town do the same thing.
Under Capitalism, this would be good for the wealthy investor, and very bad for the town, as now most of the workers have been laid off and no longer benefit from the plant.
Whereas under Socialism, automation would be good for the town. Since everyone shares in the profits of the plant, everyone would benefit from improvements to the plant's productivity.
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Does everyone share in the losses as well? How good is the town's judgment?
If it's bad, do the residents become destitute after they spend their efforts on a doomed venture? If not, who is bailing them out?
If it's great, can they leverage it beyond their own borders? Would they even care to put in the effort if the benefits go to other people?
Also, that seems incredibly unstable or else totalitarian.
Imagine that someone wants to start a new business, and applies to the town. The town declines, so they decide to go it alone (Maybe it's capital-light like a sole-proprietorship hairdresser run from home. Maybe they can get money from elsewhere.) Does the town take the profits as if they had invested? If they don't, they'll be pushed into irrelevance unless they are the best judges of value in the entire market. If they do, they're hardly better than common thieves.
Indirectly, sure. A portion of their tax money is going to fund a venture in the hopes that the venture will make money for the town. If that venture fails to do so, they're not getting that money back. That sucks, but in most places I've lived, the chance of earning any profit from your tax revenue is effectively zero, and I'd rather be taking a calculated risk than a guaranteed loss.
If the whole town is insane enough to spend the entire town's budget on a single venture, sure, but there's not much point in discussing economics if we can't assume at least semi-rational actors.
No? Why would they? If I don't invest in Apple, I don't get profits from Apple. That makes no sense.
Then they won't be relevant for some businesses, which is fine. The point of this whole thing is to prevent too much power from being in the hands of a couple of rich investors, not to stop people who don't need investors in the first place. I'm not talking about flower shops and barbers, I'm talking about the kinds of industries you couldn't possibly start without an investor, hence the power plant example.
The solution seems incredibly simple: Don't tax away that money.
I was assuming they could still use normal financial strategies like loans, and would therefore be exposed to risk in excess of their investment. Regardless, the same effect could happen if they ended up with a net liability instead of an asset (like an environmentally-damaged site that required cleanup).
If they're financing everything with cash-on-hand, then how could they ever get anything done? Here's a small, true (slightly altered for privacy) story: A factory in my hometown shut down, and some local people banded together and bought it. If it had been purchased with cash split evenly by all the town's residents, it would be $10k each.
that was a textbook-perfect opportunity for your proposed system, but I don't see how it could happen. Is the town sitting on a $10 million war chest in case something interesting comes up? Do they levy a special tax and hope that everyone has savings? We know that they aren't going to outside lenders because that would expose the town to excess risk.
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Fairness is admittedly not a major concern of mine. You can't eat fairness. It would be more fair if we were all born into subsistence farming and lived a hard miserable life until the ripe age of 25. Lots of things could be more fair and awful. I think an approach of "eating the rich" (if it succeeds, rather than just transforming them into a "poor" politically powerful class) is more likely to just get rid of the rich and not improve anyone else's welfare. The math is really hard to get around. There are too many poor people still.
I think you would just discourage the acquisition of fungible or stealable forms of wealth. As has happened in many communist countries, powerful men just switch into the activity of controlling other directly.
You seem fine destroying all private incentives to create factories. Is this intentional? All the rich people invest right now because it is a safe thing to do with their money. The US system has set it up that way. If it was not a safe thing to do, then their behavior would change.
I'm sure you'd like to add food to successfully tell your story, but you'd be wrong to do so. Food has gotten cheaper as well. What hasn't gotten cheaper is labor. So any food you consume out at a restaurant, or any food that is labor intensive is likely to be more expensive. Which feels like something you would want, yes?
Its a hotly argued debate, but one of the believed causes of the cost increase for healthcare and education is also the increased cost of labor inputs for those activities. Its why medical tourism exists where you can go to a different country and get high quality doctors with high quality equipment for a fraction of the cost in the west. The place where you are saving a bunch of money is on labor, those doctors are not paid nearly as much as their western counterparts. And it is rarely just the doctors. Its the nurses. Its the cleaning staff. It is every person involved in the enterprise.
The cost of materials to build a house from the 1900's has decreased significantly. But no one wants those houses, they want modern homes that have a whole host of features.
I'm aware of what you meant. I'm telling you that the plan you have in your head is likely a very bad one. Because it has been done before and failed miserably a bunch of times. And I was trying to explain why/how it fails.
I wrote what I thought was a pretty succinct summary explaining why they get paid more, and why they sometimes look unproductive. Though perhaps it was too succinct. If a manager is not paid more then it becomes easy for the employee to simply bribe their managers. The other stuff I think I addressed quite well.
I think how peter has the million dollars is incredibly important. Imagine there is a singer that people like to hear. They find a big empty field that no one owns. And the singer sings for everyone there. There is enough people and enough wealth that the singer is able to do this for a year and eventually earn 1 million dollars. Do you think it is bad that the singer has 1 million dollars?
In some ways, we may be at a bit of an impasse here as this comes down to terminal values, which by definition can't really be argued. Like many people, I believe that fairness is an implicit good. I can't argue for this any more than I can argue that happiness is good and suffering is bad. It's one of those things you either believe or you don't. It's not my only terminal value, or even my top value, but it's still on the list. This isn't to say that it's impossible to have a nation that's fair and shitty, just that, all else being (no pun intended) equal, it's better to be fair than unfair.
Yes. This is practically the definition of Socialism. We do not want private entities to have the amount of money that would be required to do fund like this. "No one man should have all that power" and all that.
Maybe in the last 70 years, but in the last 15 years, it has pretty definitively gotten more expensive. Anecdotally, my grocery bill has nearly doubled (adjusting for inflation) in the last decade, and everything I've found in a quick google search has supported this conclusion.
Oddly enough, I completely agree with your points about healthcare and education. Doctors get paid way too much, which stems from them having an artificially low supply, which stems from them being required to attend 8 years of medical school regardless of specialty, which I think is one of the dumbest laws we have, up there with banning townhomes.
The cost of materials is not the primary cost of a home, it's the land, which has definitely increased.
Bribe them to do what? Not manage? If the manager has stake in the company and the worker has stake in the company, then both of their paychecks are determined by how well the company does and neither of them has incentive to make this trade. Now, I suppose they could choose to do so anyway, but an economics discussion seems a bit pointless if we don't assume rational actors.
I'm not sure, and to be honest, that's so far from the base case that I don't really care. Most of the time, the one doing the work and the one profiting the most from it are not the same person. In the vast majority of cases, people don't become successful singers by being good at singing. Sure that's necessary, but lots of people are good at singing. They become successful by getting a record deal, which is to say, convincing a rich person that they can get richer by funding their career. Even the ones who don't do this are either very independently wealthy or have a more informal contract with someone who is.
Generalize this to all industries, and it becomes apparent that almost all of the power is in the hands of a very small proportion of people. I believe this kind of power imbalance is inherently a very bad thing.
Re fairness, how don’t you end up with the conclusion in Harrison Bergeron? That is, if fairness is the primary concern then we need to uglify beautiful people, slow down athletic people, dumb down smart people, de-charm charming people, etc.
If we think this is wrong (because it leads to an ugly world) do you really value fairness? Or do you value fairness as but one of many competing values?
I mean yes, but I would say this is true for most values of anyone, as almost any single value, when taken to the logical extreme, would be horrifying unless you're a paperclipper.
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Could you share your calculations?
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