With a focus on money measures of gross products, economic arguments that fail, even in money terms, become disconnected enough from reality that the argument just needs to exist to be effective in politics.
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This whole thing is good, but the bit that caught my ear for the purposes of this thread starts at 36:15.
Tom Frank is talking about class, and mentions in passing the reticence of Americans to acknowledge class issues. Earlier today, I heard another speaker say something like “populism is the American language of class”, with the implication that this was a way to evade an honest discussion.
The historical suppression of American socialism appears to be a consequence of the fascist strain that has been present in American politics from the beginning. But is the refusal to acknowledge class just another consequence of this, or is it something separate?
Where did American class silence come from? When did it begin, and why?
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I see what you did there!
But because you start from that premise, then you end up with:
I would argue that we need to understand how it is possible to NOT end up there. Look at royalty in different countries: those are all people born into a class the rest of us cannot imagine, but some use it to be careful stewards and/or promoters of good works, while others merely use it to adorn themselves and live a life of debauchery.
Many of the richest people in the U.S. got there by earning the money themselves, so they’re not the best counter-example to Trump, whereas I think royalty is a closer comparison in many ways.
Let’s face it: we’re not changing capitalism in the U.S. in our lifetimes to such a degree that there won’t be any billionaires anymore. What we want, in addition to a fairer spread of income and a reasonable minimum level for the most disadvantaged, is for those who do make extreme amounts of wealth to feed it back into the system in some way that helps the whole of society, not just themselves.
Tax cuts does the exact opposite. We’re creating more Trumps with that sort of thinking. If we went back to the top tax rate of 90%, people who did well in their careers would still do well in their careers, and there’d also be more money for schools, hospitals, roads, etc.
The wealthiest don’t have to be like Trump at all. In fact, many aren’t. But if we set regulations that support unbridled selfishness, we can’t be surprised when many of them make similar choices.
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I was riffing Rump a little, but not that much, or the lampshade would have been much more gaily painted. My point is that past a certain point, wealth is about outsourcing responsibilty and coasting on contracts.
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Compare and contrast.
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And that’s my point: I don’t agree that “wealth is about outsourcing responsibility and coasting on contracts” is true for all of them, so let’s try to figure out what helps people make good choices with mega money; plus, there are things we can do (like progressive taxation) to force the ultra-wealthy to support the rest of society even when it’s not in their nature.
I just don’t see that lumping all mega-wealthy together as equally Trump-like is accurate or helpful. Among other things, those who have found themselves moving significantly between the classes (which supposedly don’t exist in the U.S.) have very different reactions. You think you know how you would handle it, but people have very different responses, some selfish but some in fact become more generous. I think there’s a difference between those (like Buffett, Gates, etc.) who earned their way to the top and those like Trump who probably wouldn’t have any notable career at all without the extraordinary support that his father’s wealth gave him. But there are others who also inherited their good fortune who have worked to benefit society instead of take from it. Off the top of my head, Gloria Vanderbilt’s son (Anderson Cooper) comes to mind.
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I think it’s less that wealthy people are bad and more that the bad ones can get away with things on a scale that the average person can’t. Someone with Trump’s business acumen and not the inherited wealth would quickly become another statistic in the “failed and bankrupt and nobody cares” category. Nobody would notice them.
Add in the fact that being born into wealth means that you don’t need to be introduced to those who make things easier, and the rotten and incompetent simply don’t get filtered out the way they do when you have less money. Trump didn’t get a TV show then the White House by being rich, it was the connections, and his sociopathic willingness to exploit them.
Which leads to the question: do money/power create sociopaths, or are sociopaths just more willing to do the things that allow them greater freedom for their evil?
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The problem here is that Trump’s business acumen is actually quite good… in his line of work, which is not running legitimate businesses (Hell, he couldn’t even turn a profit on a casino, fer crissake!). His real line of work is conning investors into keeping him in the style to which he’s become accustomed. If he didn’t have that talent, he would have run through his inheritance and been on the street a long time ago.
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I think that’s a perfect way to describe it. It’s a great way to face the difficulties and the detractors - people so willing to give up without even trying just because ‘How would we do that? It would be too hard.’ After all, we were losing the space race when Kennedy said
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win
A 21st century moonshot - saving our society from collapse.
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Thread:
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I disagree with nothing you posted apart from a quibble with the first sentence. 
I suspect that Dan might reply:
That depends upon how you define “successful”.
Particularly in areas like healthcare, there is a substantial (but not uncontested) argument that the profit motive is fundamentally incompatible with achieving the best possible outcomes.
There’s also a secondary argument to be had about how much you can partially socialise your economy while remaining a capitalist.
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Alternatively, those things can be privately provided, especially if they are new, but the government can recognise they are infrastructure and with things so profit is less weighted. This happened in Sweden with some bus services: companies competed in rural areas to provide the best service, and the one that met defined service targets the best got the Stockholm contract, with the proviso that if service dropped anywhere they would automatically lose the contract.
Either way, unchecked, laissez-faire, profit-focused capitalism is contained. Interestingly, in countries where this sort of thing is pushed, you will find CEOs who are very proud of how their corporate efforts have both helped the country and made them rich. It’s when the efforts are tepid and defanged by pressure from the more robber baron types that more people think it isn’t possible.
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The thing to remember is that we’ve shifted focus on what is considered ‘successful’ to only the near term. Success to a mosquito is very different than success to an elephant. Success measured in financial quarters and stock price, with no consideration for the long term prospects of a company, is only fleeting ‘success’, and we need to get back to recognizing that fact.
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You know, I’d much rather have a little house and full medical than I would a new football stadium, TYVM.
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I did not lump the wealthy all together. I spent a fair amount of time describing wealth that wasn’t Trumpist or even substantially exploitative of anyone but themselves. As a said, I riffed Rump only slightly. You took that, ran with it, and ignored the majority of what I said; at least, that’s how I feel. I get that a lot, it’s my fault. I mumble a bit.
So, without allusion and without taking much from a broad palette of hatred for the rich, let me state it plainly: the rich work themselves into a corner the more wealthy they are. That corner has a Rockefeller flavor, a Carnegie flavor, a Koch flavor, a Trump flavor, whatever flavor the name is. They’re rich enough they earn their own flavor even when they’ve stopped earning anything else.
With increasing wealth they will reach a point where they cannot be effective with their wealth except to create an authoritarian corporate hive and keep growing. The hours in the day do not increase with their wealth so they cannot do more actual work. They must turn to more value-added methods to make their hours more effective.
They buy labor and plant, then go on to buy out their competitors labor and plant, then go on to put a stop to others building labor and plant to build as close to a monopoly as they can. There they sling overpriced, mediocre goods, like Bill Gates. His company and the choads that he brought up to keep it going (who themselves have gone on to be very successful athletic team owners 
) have sucked more value out of the global economy from lost work hours than any one government could have. But he’s been working on malaria, so that’s all good.
Like Warren Buffett they may become a pure investor and buy a company like Precision Cast Parts, a Portland company whose reputation among their employees is among the worst of anyone I’ve ever heard. PCP (or whatever they’re called now) is incredibly profitable because they squeeze their employees for as much labor as they can give, denying them any life, discriminating freely against women and minorities (for reduced wages at that workload, if nothing else)… and what do they make? War shit. But yes, they’re relentlessly profitable, so go Warren Buffett! And he gave nothing to his kids and grandkids that someone with four less zeros wouldn’t give them! What a sweetheart.
They may play on the celebrity of wealth to make themselves a brand. If it ends there, you get Anderson Cooper, a bland media personality who brings some awareness to causes between daily rounds of sensationalized, fluffy snoozery and other bullshit.
I can say bad things about George Soros too, if you like. Talk about a guy trying to buy his way into the good graces of the kind of rich people who try very hard to believe in democracy so long as that democracy doesn’t reflect the economic dysfunctions at their core.
Even three examples of not-Trumps who aren’t as evil as Trump don’t look too great given the control they exercise. They’re still a blight. Where they’ve become hivelords of corporate monopolies, they are hivelords of corporate monopolies. Where they’ve become a rabid champion of reliably high profitability, that’s still what they are. Where they’ve hit their limits and haven’t figured out how to be truly effective by fighting directly against their class, they’re pretty useless at keeping wealth in check.
I apologize for taking this too personally and for taking so long to get back. Work has been stressful, the Elsewhere was moving on a kind of a vague timetable, and I’ve been puking up jelly-like flu-cous for three days now.
I hope you are all doing better than that.
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Where do you draw the ideological line on that? Are the Nordic economies capitalist? Is Bernie a capitalist [1]?
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[1] Incidentally, the DSA crowd would mostly say that Bernie is just barely socialist. The left-of-the-DSA activists mostly deny that he’s a socialist at all.
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