Article - Was Marx Right?

[RadiantPhoenix]

You know, it occurs to me, one problem with tzor's idea is that people can still trade promises of the contents of the lockboxes.

[LargePrime]

You know, it occurs to me, one problem with tzor's idea is that people can still trade promises of the contents of the lockboxes.

That is how a finance guy is born.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The other thing I truly do not like about the focus on 'income mobility' is that it blithely ignores the phenomenon of child poverty. If income mobility is high but income inequality is also high, that still means that there are going to be some families out there who have children and they'll spend X many years growing up in poverty. And if you spend the first eight years of your life living in an area with air pollution or with mercury in the water or just not getting enough nutritious food it doesn't matter if your parents suddenly become Richie Rich and you live the next seventy years in the lap of luxury. It's already too fucking late, you have asthma and depressed mental abilities which are going to fuck you over no matter how quality the rest of your life is.

If we were doing a Lilliputian thing where children were considered society's resource rather than a parent's resource high income inequality with high income mobility would be nowhere near as bad. I mean, it would still suck shit and be indefensible because poverty literally shaves years off of your life no matter how old you are, but as long as we insist on the system of 'parents raise children' the very idea that income inequality can be made up with high income mobility is downright monstrous.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The Keynesian + Neo-Socialist patch appears to be able to keep society from falling apart indefinitely. Unfortunately, it is destroyable from the outside if someone else is dumping goods on you in order to hyperinflate their own capitalist expansion. That is: while technological progress increases productivity and decreases the value of the production end-products, and this difference can taken as shorter working hours or a greater standard of living for the working class, it can also be taken as a higher concentration of wealth so long as there is a consumer of last resort. With globalization, the capitalists thought that they could not run out of consumers, because the extra goods could be sold anywhere in the world.

Would the proper way for the Swedens of the world to fight having their prosperity being undermined by having consumers of last resort be to distribute free money and education to said consumers of last resort? A Marshall Plan 2.0 definitely seems cheaper in the long run than watching people suck dollars out of your economy while turning places into Dickensonian hellscapes.

[sabs]

In the end, we need to take the need to 'work' out of the requirement for basic survival.

Basics should be taken for granted
Food
Shelter
Electricity
Education
Internet Access I think has become something that should be available.