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 -
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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