i am just hoping that someday i will be able to afford a retirement and the house it will require so that i can actually do something with my time then and not have lived my entire life pointlessly for nothing never actually doing anything of my own origination in the entire time
yesterday on my lunch break i had some thoughts about maybe just writing a brief synopsis/outline/overview of the huge series of interconnected stories that i once wanted to spend my life writing so that people could at least see that and think 'yeah that wouldn't been cool if you'd've written that'. i couldnt find time to finish even that yesterday. today i thought maybe i would just shorten the remaining part i didn't get a chance to write but unless i can find it in my to do so in the next 15 mins it looks like even that fucking synopsis is going to be yet another unfinished project i will probably never get back to.
What I *want* is to have a well-enough rested brain that I get bored and start doing creative productive self-directed things. I would most like for my entire life to be filled with the kind of passionate creative energy I had when I was younger and far less busy, where I was constantly thinking of new things and working on projects and would stay up into the middle of the night neglecting sleep and meals because meh I can catch up on them later if I need to right now I'm engaged in this.
But as I've gotten older life has gotten much, much busier, and now by the end of most workdays my brain is so fucking fried that i can bareby bother capitalizing or spllechecking myself when i make typeos i just dont fucking care anymore it too much im too exhausted i cant bother to think about anything, but I am also overwhelmed with anxiety thinking about every next possible thing that might put a demand on me and revved up a million miles an hour from being in a panicked rush all goddamn day long, and if I have nothing to engage my brain with at all I will just spin the wheels out of control and fucking lose it.
So even though I don't have the energy to do anything I would really like to be doing in my spare time, I need to be doing something, and TV is a nice mindless something that can put my aching mind to sleep and give me a brief respite from the hell that is just getting through every day until I am tired enough to check out of consciousness entirely, just to get up and do it all over again the next day.
So watching TV feels like I'm wasting my life, but TV isn't the cause, it's just a bandaid over the problem, making the fact that I'm wasting my life anyway just hurt a little bit less.
Or they could just demonetize the offending channel if sending them money is the problem? It's entirely up to Google whether or not to send NK money for things on their channel. Not like NK is going to sue them in a US court over it or something.
That is true that left and right simply isn't good enough, and the Nolan chart is a step in the right direction, but I still think it doesn't go nearly far enough. I find myself wanting to be further left than the top of the chart, but also further up than the left of the chart, in a region outside the chart entirely.
This is the political spectrum I think in.. The orientation of my chart is a bit of a compromise; the original sense of the terms "left" and "right" would run from what on that chart is upper left to lower right (which is the sense in which I meant "left" in my previous post), while a growing modern sense of the terms tends to run from what on that chart is lower left to upper right, so I've oriented it halfway between those.
Things tend to drift downward and rightward by default unless actively fought against -- that's where we started from, before anyone had the thought that maybe governments should be anything more than the reign of strong men over weak -- and those positions are stable, easily entrenched, and hard to escape from. Things in the upper half and left half meanwhile are unstable and tend to easily collapse -- back to the lower right, of course. That makes those (far upper and far left) positions impractical, but they're exactly the kind of crazy I think we need to make people realize just how far off the spectrum we think in true moderation is. In addition to that, we also need more moderate "right"-libertarians (like the Libertarian party) and European style social democrats (like the Green party).
I find the mainstream Democratic party as expressed in recent decades (Clinton and Obama) to be a lukewarm centrist compromise position, neither libertarian enough nor socialist enough, but certainly a better alternative than contemporary Republicans, who share most of the same flaws and then add a bunch of their own; just so long as they can avoid slipping down into their own form of "left"-authoritarianism that's just as bad in a different way.
But we really need the crazies way out in the upper left lunatic fringe to shift the perceived center up and to the left; not actually out into that fringe, but further away from the black hole of tyranny we (everyone) are always continually slipping toward unless we can manage to fight it.
All anarchists until the recent coinage of the term "anarcho-capitalism" -- which most anarchists consider a contradiction in terms -- considered themselves the libertarian branch of the socialist movement; in fact the term "libertarian" was for the longest time (until the American re-coinage as a new term for what used to be just called "liberal", after "liberal" was repurposed in America to something closer to "state-socialist") short for "libertarian socialist", which is what anarchists called themselves; socialists, but not state socialists like the Marxists.
They oppose all forms of hierarchy, including capitalist forms of hierarchy (bosses over workers, landlords over tenants, etc), and opposing capitalism makes you socialist.
If you disallow contracts of the form "I give you some money for a share of your profits in the future", by definition, you don't have a free market anymore.
The state declining to enforce certain arbitrary obligations between parties does not make the market not free. You can buy and sell things -- real actual things, not abstract legal constructs -- at whatever price to whomever will agree to it, and nobody will stop you. That's all it takes to make a market free. Otherwise the unenforceability of contracts selling yourself into slavery or any of many other onerous terms considered to make many contracts unenforceable -- or the complete absence of a state to enforce the contracts at all -- would make a market "unfree". Saying "you can't have a freedom without slavery" or "you can't have freedom without the state" sound patently absurd to most, and "you can't have freedom without usury" is every bit as absurd.
Also, "I give you some money for a share of your profits in the future" does not describe a loan, that describes buying a share of a company, which I've said is fine. Loan repayment is not contingent on future profitability; lenders don't get more or less interest on loans depending on how well the borrower is doing. Giving a business money in exchange for a share of their future profits -- buying shares -- is no different from saying "hey I think you make good widgets, I'll pay for the advertising and stuff like that if you bring the widget-making gear and we can go into business together, split the proceeds", except a bit further abstracted.
Furthermore, if you disallow such contracts, people have no incentive to lend money to businesses, and so the only people who can start new businesses are rich people. That really isn't particularly conducive to economic growth or fairness.
First see above, and then think: what are people with capital beyond their personal use going to do with it if they can't lend it out for profit? If it's useless to "invest" that way, and they still want to enjoy the benefits their capital, they'll either have to trade it away buying goods and services from others (which then profits those others who can then use that money to start or grow their own business), or go into business with others by buying stock (with which money the others can again start or grow their businesses).
Likewise, capital like land, if it can't be rented out, will have to be sold off (on whatever terms the market of people who need it to live in, rather than to rent out, can afford), lest it be of no value at all, so in the absence of rent, ownership will naturally, voluntarily, become more distributed. That's the whole point. The way things are done right now is not the only way they can be done, it's just the way that most benefits those who already own everything. If those ways weren't available, things would be done in other ways instead, ways that still benefit those with more, temporarily, not perpetually, and in a way that diminishes that advantage as it happens.
And Smith was right: relative to the unfree economic systems of the time, free markets promoted greater equality.
And the systems they had in place at the time were more capitalist than the free markets they promoted. Freedom of the market made it harder for being a big rich existing player to get you an advantage, easier for the little guys to compete with them, less capitalistic.
If making income from investments isn't "unearned income", what exactly do you think is "unearned income" then?
You're throwing around "investments" in an overly-vague fashion. It is possible to make an unearned income from "investments", and I oppose that. If you "invest" by lending money at interest, that is an unearned income. If you "invest" by buying real estate and renting it out, that is unearned income. Anything where someone is paying you just because you own something they want to use; in one word, usury, in its original sense of "a fee for use".
But if you "invest" by building a business (buying the equipment you need to do work, advertising to get customers, etc), that's earned income. (Presuming the business income comes from doing actual work and not the aforementioned kinds of parasitism). If you and a partner "invest" in building a business together, that's earned income. If you "invest" by buying into a preexisting partnership as a new third (or fourth, etc) partner, that's still earned income. Buying a share of a publicly traded company is just a continuation of that.
And why do you use the term differently from the way people like Sanders or Clinton use it?
Because I'm employing more nuanced political and economic philosophy than usually flies in the mainstream political discourse, where anything beyond "D good, R bad" or vice versa flies over the heads of most people.
I think you probably don't know anything about the history of anarchism. Or probably socialism, for that matter, if (as I suspect) you think socialist = statist and anarchist = capitalist. When in fact anarchism is a form of socialism, and statism and capitalism tend to lead to each other.
Why would you want to "get rid of that"? That's where business investments, retirement benefits, government infrastructure investments, insurance, and pretty much every other long term benefit comes from. If you got rid of that, you'd simply end up with a lot of individually owned corporations (like the Koch brothers) that ordinary people would have no ability to invest in.
Owning stock is not automatically collecting an unearned income. Not in the way lending at interest or renting out property are. I have no objection to companies being held by arbitrarily many parties instead of just one or a few, in fact that's a good way to make sure that capital is broadly distributed -- a socialist end.
If you have free markets, you get a high degree of inequality
Do you realize that it was Marx who put that proposition forward, and in doing so equated free markets with capitalism? The original market proponents like Smith and Mill saw markets as (though they didn't have the term) a socialist thing, encouraging greater equality. Marx was wrong, and you're promulgating his error, in opposition to the founders of the free market economics I'm sure you nominally cherish.
This is why this country needs a radical left. Anarchists and socialists of every stripe, most of them as wrong as the crazies dragging the whole country down to the right for a generation, just in the opposite direction. So that people can see that there's crazy at the fringe in either direction, and find where true moderation is somewhere in between them.
Kinda like how the existence of the Black Panthers made Martin Luther King, Jr., seem all the more reasonable. The Panthers were wrong, but they were useful, and a really crazy loud radical left would be usefully wrong in a similar way.
However, calling that "state capitalism" is a misnomer; that kind of economic system is not a form of capitalism, just like "crony capitalism" isn't a form of capitalism; both of those are politically motivated, misleading terms.
Wealth concentrates in the hands of those who already have capital. That's capitalism: a system where it's possible to gain an unearned income just from already owning capital. It doesn't matter (for qualifying as capitalism) whether or not the state is meddling in who gets to be the winning capitalists. Capitalism doesn't mean "free market".
It is true that both fascism and socialism have these as goals. The distinguishing feature between them is that socialism advocates public ownership of the means of production, while fascism advocates strongly regulated private ownership of the means of production (what you called "state capitalism" above).
Same problem here as we started with, except now you're explicitly spelling out the contradiction. How is private ownership of the means of the production -- presumably here meaning by a relatively few parties, not widely distributed -- allowing those parties to collect an unearned income in virtue of that ownership, at all in line with the goal of eliminating unearned income and distributing wealth more fairly? Fascism is all about the former, and so cannot be about the latter, and the whole thing smells of a politically motivated attempt to equate socialism with fascism.
"Libertarian socialism" would be a society in which people voluntarily behave according to socialist principles; there is a better name for that society, it's called "communism", and it's Marx's hypothetical endpoint of history. It doesn't exist.
And the concept of "free market socialism" makes no sense: the whole point of socialism is public ownership of the means of production. You can't have that and simultaneously have anything like a free market.
Picture a society where ownership of the means of production is widely and fairly evenly distributed -- in individual hands, not through the government. People are allowed to buy or sell things voluntarily, on terms they agree upon. But there is no mechanism whereby having a capital advantages allows you to perpetually increase your capital advantage -- there are no means of collecting an unearned income, whatever those means may be -- so "despite" that free trade, ownership of the means of production stays widely and fairly evenly distributed, in proportion to the actual work that people do, as valued by the rest of the market. That is libertarian socialism, or free market socialism. There is nothing inherently contradictory in it.
In fact it's just what you would naively expect any free market to be like: those with wealth trade it to those without for their labor to save themselves labor, and in the process wealth naturally trickles down increasing the wealth of the laborers who can then labor a little less while those who had wealth now need to labor some more to get more wealth themselves, and everybody has to work for a living and everybody has some share of the wealth in proportion to their labor (since in absence of differences in labor the wealth levels would naturally equalize). What throws a wrench in that whole beautiful idea is anything that allows those who already have wealth to siphon off the wealth of those who already lack it, getting back what they paid for labor so they can pay for it all over again, and keeping those who already lacked it perpetually lacking it and so subservient to those who already had it. It turns what should be a "water seeking its own level" flow of work and resources into a never-ending waterfall, a perpetual motion machine of injustice.
The trick is in figuring out what exactly is the means by which capitalists are able to leverage an unearned income, so you can get rid of that. State socialists don't fix that problem, they just take from those who have
I think you've mistaken me for someone who is defending statism of any form. Statism in any form is bad.
But statism explicitly entrenching inequalities, as in fascism, is bad on top of bad, when contrasted with a state actually working toward equality. Not that it often actually does, because authority breeds inequality just as much as inequality breeds authority. Statism tends toward state capitalism, not socialism; capitalism tends toward state capitalism, not libertarianism. The general tendency is always toward authority and inequality. Fascism, or feudalism in its preindustrial form, is the lowest ground that we continually fall toward when we lose the fight for liberty and equality, which must be fought for together because a deficit in either will lead to a deficit in the other.
Also, for what it's worth, Stalinism and its derivatives were generally considered, sometimes by themselves and usually by other contemporary socialists and communists, to be forms of state capitalism ostensibly as a transitional form on the way to state socialism and then later communism, i.e. basically openly operating "temporarily" as fascists, in the name of (i.e. to further the cause of) communism. So all those things were done by fascists, just "instrumental" fascists rather than "ideological" ones.
Whom (fascists), you'll note, I agree are the worst.
Probably the primary ideological idea of fascism is a rejection of capitalism and unearned income, and demands for a "fair" redistribution of wealth
Where the hell are you getting that shit from? The core concept of fascism is state capitalism: the collusion of the state and business capital, with the state picking winners and propping up monolithic leaders of different industries, eliminating fair competition, etc, in the process, all "for the good" of the nation as some top-down unified whole, but with equality no part of the equation -- there are big winners and big losers, but the state picks who is who. Mussolini, who coined the term, said himself that it might better have been called corporatism.
The rejection of unearned income (which, not free markets, is the defining characteristic of capitalism), and the aim of a fairer distribution of wealth, is not fascism but socialism (which, mind you, need not be statist; there is such a thing as libertarian socialism, or free market socialism). It sounds to me like you just think those words mean the same thing, because in your mind socialism = statism and statism = fascism, when in reality statism vs libertarianism and capitalism vs socialism are orthogonal issues, and fascism is the corner of the resultant grid where statism meets capitalism, the worst of both worlds. Neither state socialism nor libertarian capitalism are its opposite; libertarian socialism is.
Since nobody can afford to own their own home anymore, and there's no social safety nets, and all the jobs are being automated, so everyone will just get kicked out of their rented homes and die in the streets en masse.
Yes, because the best solution to this problem is to relocate tens of millions of people. That's totally a feasible thing to suggest, to just mostly empty out the third largest and most populous state in the entire country. That's not crazy at all.
Because the only reason to live anywhere in an enormous geographical area is because your job is there, and not because you, like tens of millions of other people, were born and raised there and all your family and friends and loved ones and your entire life is there?
Why don't all retired Brits leave the UK and move to eastern Europe somewhere that it's much cheaper? That's about the same scale we're talking here.
If you retire with $500k in spending cash and a paid-off house then yeah that works our pretty well, but then you just went and doubled the amount you need to retire.
But unless you have an odball definition of filthy stinking rich, "miserable poverty" is not the only alternative.
That's why "rich" was in quotes. The closest alternative to miserably poverty, a moderately safe life where you're not constantly having to bribe other people to let you exist in their space (renting, be it land or money to buy land) and have savings beyond that to cushion your fall once you're unable to work, which should be a reasonable standard of living that almost everyone should be able to expect in the modern developed world, is in fact a standard of living far and beyond the reaches of the vast majority of the country today.
I make more money than 75% of individual Americans, live more cheaply than most of them, and it's still looking like I might only finish step one (pay off a house) just in time to die, unless I either move to a shit hole in the middle of nowhere (where almost nobody lives, for good reason), or else move to what may as well be a different country (where many fewer people than all the people poorer than me in my area live, so not something reasonable to expect of me unless you expect almost the entirety of California to leave the state too), in either case abandoning everyone and everything I know and love, just for a chance to live a life not worth living, having given all of that up to attain it. And 75% of Americans are worse off than that. We're all well and truly fucked, except those who were born early enough and had opportunity and foresight enough to hop on the real estate train before it pulled away and abandoned entire generations to a miserable inevitable death.
For someone living in a median house in the most populous state in the country, $25k/year will barely cover the mortgage.
If you retire with $500k in spending cash and a paid-off house then yeah that works our pretty well, but then you just went and doubled the amount you need to retire.
Yes thank you, that was the point I was making rhetorically to the obviously-right-wing person I was replying to. Such right-wingers have a conundrum: private "public squares" on the internet exhibit what they perceive as left-wing bias. But the alternative, truly public (government-owned) "public squares", are inherently contrary to right-wing anti-government ideology, just by their very existence.
A lot of happy poor people are happy because they're living in the moment and not worrying about the future, and poor for the same exact reason. I grew up with a carefree, I'm-awesome-the-world-is-fundamentally-good-and-everything-will-work-out-for-me-somehow attitude. That plunged me into abject poverty the moment I hit adulthood. I thought for a while it was a run of bad luck, just a bunch of unfortunate problems for me personally that weren't my fault and weren't indicative of the state of the world, and things would get better, and so long as stuff wasn't actively bad right now I was happy-go-lucky again.
After enough of that shit for long enough I realized that life is naturally shit, almost everybody fails constantly at every aspect of it, and you have to nut the fuck up and constantly work your goddamn balls off at kicking its fucking ass or else such "strings of bad luck" will destroy the entire rest of your life. Now I'm a moderately well-to-do but miserable, stressed out, angry "workaholic" as far as my lazy happy-go-lucky perpetually-in-poverty family are concerned, except I don't like working, I fucking hate it, I am working so fucking hard so that someday, maybe, someday I will be able to actually have the security I naively thought was the natural state of the world when I was young, and then, and only then, will I maybe be able to relax again and kick back and be happy, because even if I quit doing the stress-induced "workaholic" shit right now, even if I tried living like I was happy-go-lucky again, I couldn't actually be happy because now I know that there is going to be another "unfortunate disaster" right around the fucking corner any goddamn minute and I am not safe from it yet, maybe I'm safe from one or two by now but not long term, "relaxing" just means wearing away the tiny buffer between me and poverty that all my hard work has managed to achieve, and would do nothing but make waste all of that effort.
There are lot of people out there who are dirt poor, old, and just barely surviving by a thread, and only thanks to the sliver of social safety net we still have left. My parents are both among them, with my dad living in a falling-apart trailer on land that he's constantly on the verge of losing for tax or inspection reasons, and my mom drifting from one shithole bedroom shared with two other people to another. They've both got flaws that I could blame them both for their own circumstances, but then they also both made plenty of money in their prime, I'm told money comparable to what I'm making now, which the statistics tell me is about twice what the median individual American makes (or about the median American household). I live in a tiny trailer myself to save on rent, live a lifestyle that everyone I know describes as too cheap (refraining from buying fairly ordinary things most people have that "I can afford" but don't strictly need because having that money in the future is more important) and save pretty much every other paycheck, frantically trying to avoid their fate, but when I do the math I'm still not sure it's going to work out. If I'm lucky, our social safety nets will still exist when the time comes, and my own preparation will actually make for a nice retirement, but I'm not counting on it -- and if I lived like my parents, I'd probably starve or die of exposure at their age. And they're not even retirement age yet!
Most people die miserable in poverty and you have to be filthy stinking "rich" to have any hope of avoiding that.
Slashdot Mirror
i am just hoping that someday i will be able to afford a retirement and the house it will require so that i can actually do something with my time then and not have lived my entire life pointlessly for nothing never actually doing anything of my own origination in the entire time
yesterday on my lunch break i had some thoughts about maybe just writing a brief synopsis/outline/overview of the huge series of interconnected stories that i once wanted to spend my life writing so that people could at least see that and think 'yeah that wouldn't been cool if you'd've written that'. i couldnt find time to finish even that yesterday. today i thought maybe i would just shorten the remaining part i didn't get a chance to write but unless i can find it in my to do so in the next 15 mins it looks like even that fucking synopsis is going to be yet another unfinished project i will probably never get back to.
I feel somewhere between the two of you.
What I *want* is to have a well-enough rested brain that I get bored and start doing creative productive self-directed things. I would most like for my entire life to be filled with the kind of passionate creative energy I had when I was younger and far less busy, where I was constantly thinking of new things and working on projects and would stay up into the middle of the night neglecting sleep and meals because meh I can catch up on them later if I need to right now I'm engaged in this.
But as I've gotten older life has gotten much, much busier, and now by the end of most workdays my brain is so fucking fried that i can bareby bother capitalizing or spllechecking myself when i make typeos i just dont fucking care anymore it too much im too exhausted i cant bother to think about anything, but I am also overwhelmed with anxiety thinking about every next possible thing that might put a demand on me and revved up a million miles an hour from being in a panicked rush all goddamn day long, and if I have nothing to engage my brain with at all I will just spin the wheels out of control and fucking lose it.
So even though I don't have the energy to do anything I would really like to be doing in my spare time, I need to be doing something, and TV is a nice mindless something that can put my aching mind to sleep and give me a brief respite from the hell that is just getting through every day until I am tired enough to check out of consciousness entirely, just to get up and do it all over again the next day.
So watching TV feels like I'm wasting my life, but TV isn't the cause, it's just a bandaid over the problem, making the fact that I'm wasting my life anyway just hurt a little bit less.
It's a hopeful story you tell and I wish that it comes true, but life has taught me not to trust hope.
Or they could just demonetize the offending channel if sending them money is the problem? It's entirely up to Google whether or not to send NK money for things on their channel. Not like NK is going to sue them in a US court over it or something.
That is true that left and right simply isn't good enough, and the Nolan chart is a step in the right direction, but I still think it doesn't go nearly far enough. I find myself wanting to be further left than the top of the chart, but also further up than the left of the chart, in a region outside the chart entirely.
This is the political spectrum I think in.. The orientation of my chart is a bit of a compromise; the original sense of the terms "left" and "right" would run from what on that chart is upper left to lower right (which is the sense in which I meant "left" in my previous post), while a growing modern sense of the terms tends to run from what on that chart is lower left to upper right, so I've oriented it halfway between those.
Things tend to drift downward and rightward by default unless actively fought against -- that's where we started from, before anyone had the thought that maybe governments should be anything more than the reign of strong men over weak -- and those positions are stable, easily entrenched, and hard to escape from. Things in the upper half and left half meanwhile are unstable and tend to easily collapse -- back to the lower right, of course. That makes those (far upper and far left) positions impractical, but they're exactly the kind of crazy I think we need to make people realize just how far off the spectrum we think in true moderation is. In addition to that, we also need more moderate "right"-libertarians (like the Libertarian party) and European style social democrats (like the Green party).
I find the mainstream Democratic party as expressed in recent decades (Clinton and Obama) to be a lukewarm centrist compromise position, neither libertarian enough nor socialist enough, but certainly a better alternative than contemporary Republicans, who share most of the same flaws and then add a bunch of their own; just so long as they can avoid slipping down into their own form of "left"-authoritarianism that's just as bad in a different way.
But we really need the crazies way out in the upper left lunatic fringe to shift the perceived center up and to the left; not actually out into that fringe, but further away from the black hole of tyranny we (everyone) are always continually slipping toward unless we can manage to fight it.
All anarchists until the recent coinage of the term "anarcho-capitalism" -- which most anarchists consider a contradiction in terms -- considered themselves the libertarian branch of the socialist movement; in fact the term "libertarian" was for the longest time (until the American re-coinage as a new term for what used to be just called "liberal", after "liberal" was repurposed in America to something closer to "state-socialist") short for "libertarian socialist", which is what anarchists called themselves; socialists, but not state socialists like the Marxists.
They oppose all forms of hierarchy, including capitalist forms of hierarchy (bosses over workers, landlords over tenants, etc), and opposing capitalism makes you socialist.
If you disallow contracts of the form "I give you some money for a share of your profits in the future", by definition, you don't have a free market anymore.
The state declining to enforce certain arbitrary obligations between parties does not make the market not free. You can buy and sell things -- real actual things, not abstract legal constructs -- at whatever price to whomever will agree to it, and nobody will stop you. That's all it takes to make a market free. Otherwise the unenforceability of contracts selling yourself into slavery or any of many other onerous terms considered to make many contracts unenforceable -- or the complete absence of a state to enforce the contracts at all -- would make a market "unfree". Saying "you can't have a freedom without slavery" or "you can't have freedom without the state" sound patently absurd to most, and "you can't have freedom without usury" is every bit as absurd.
Also, "I give you some money for a share of your profits in the future" does not describe a loan, that describes buying a share of a company, which I've said is fine. Loan repayment is not contingent on future profitability; lenders don't get more or less interest on loans depending on how well the borrower is doing. Giving a business money in exchange for a share of their future profits -- buying shares -- is no different from saying "hey I think you make good widgets, I'll pay for the advertising and stuff like that if you bring the widget-making gear and we can go into business together, split the proceeds", except a bit further abstracted.
Furthermore, if you disallow such contracts, people have no incentive to lend money to businesses, and so the only people who can start new businesses are rich people. That really isn't particularly conducive to economic growth or fairness.
First see above, and then think: what are people with capital beyond their personal use going to do with it if they can't lend it out for profit? If it's useless to "invest" that way, and they still want to enjoy the benefits their capital, they'll either have to trade it away buying goods and services from others (which then profits those others who can then use that money to start or grow their own business), or go into business with others by buying stock (with which money the others can again start or grow their businesses).
Likewise, capital like land, if it can't be rented out, will have to be sold off (on whatever terms the market of people who need it to live in, rather than to rent out, can afford), lest it be of no value at all, so in the absence of rent, ownership will naturally, voluntarily, become more distributed. That's the whole point. The way things are done right now is not the only way they can be done, it's just the way that most benefits those who already own everything. If those ways weren't available, things would be done in other ways instead, ways that still benefit those with more, temporarily, not perpetually, and in a way that diminishes that advantage as it happens.
And Smith was right: relative to the unfree economic systems of the time, free markets promoted greater equality.
And the systems they had in place at the time were more capitalist than the free markets they promoted. Freedom of the market made it harder for being a big rich existing player to get you an advantage, easier for the little guys to compete with them, less capitalistic.
If making income from investments isn't "unearned income", what exactly do you think is "unearned income" then?
You're throwing around "investments" in an overly-vague fashion. It is possible to make an unearned income from "investments", and I oppose that. If you "invest" by lending money at interest, that is an unearned income. If you "invest" by buying real estate and renting it out, that is unearned income. Anything where someone is paying you just because you own something they want to use; in one word, usury, in its original sense of "a fee for use".
But if you "invest" by building a business (buying the equipment you need to do work, advertising to get customers, etc), that's earned income. (Presuming the business income comes from doing actual work and not the aforementioned kinds of parasitism). If you and a partner "invest" in building a business together, that's earned income. If you "invest" by buying into a preexisting partnership as a new third (or fourth, etc) partner, that's still earned income. Buying a share of a publicly traded company is just a continuation of that.
And why do you use the term differently from the way people like Sanders or Clinton use it?
Because I'm employing more nuanced political and economic philosophy than usually flies in the mainstream political discourse, where anything beyond "D good, R bad" or vice versa flies over the heads of most people.
I think you probably don't know anything about the history of anarchism. Or probably socialism, for that matter, if (as I suspect) you think socialist = statist and anarchist = capitalist. When in fact anarchism is a form of socialism, and statism and capitalism tend to lead to each other.
I wish I could mod you up so more people could learn of this. Thanks for sharing that, it explains a lot.
Why would you want to "get rid of that"? That's where business investments, retirement benefits, government infrastructure investments, insurance, and pretty much every other long term benefit comes from. If you got rid of that, you'd simply end up with a lot of individually owned corporations (like the Koch brothers) that ordinary people would have no ability to invest in.
Owning stock is not automatically collecting an unearned income. Not in the way lending at interest or renting out property are. I have no objection to companies being held by arbitrarily many parties instead of just one or a few, in fact that's a good way to make sure that capital is broadly distributed -- a socialist end.
If you have free markets, you get a high degree of inequality
Do you realize that it was Marx who put that proposition forward, and in doing so equated free markets with capitalism? The original market proponents like Smith and Mill saw markets as (though they didn't have the term) a socialist thing, encouraging greater equality. Marx was wrong, and you're promulgating his error, in opposition to the founders of the free market economics I'm sure you nominally cherish.
This is why this country needs a radical left. Anarchists and socialists of every stripe, most of them as wrong as the crazies dragging the whole country down to the right for a generation, just in the opposite direction. So that people can see that there's crazy at the fringe in either direction, and find where true moderation is somewhere in between them.
Kinda like how the existence of the Black Panthers made Martin Luther King, Jr., seem all the more reasonable. The Panthers were wrong, but they were useful, and a really crazy loud radical left would be usefully wrong in a similar way.
However, calling that "state capitalism" is a misnomer; that kind of economic system is not a form of capitalism, just like "crony capitalism" isn't a form of capitalism; both of those are politically motivated, misleading terms.
Wealth concentrates in the hands of those who already have capital. That's capitalism: a system where it's possible to gain an unearned income just from already owning capital. It doesn't matter (for qualifying as capitalism) whether or not the state is meddling in who gets to be the winning capitalists. Capitalism doesn't mean "free market".
It is true that both fascism and socialism have these as goals. The distinguishing feature between them is that socialism advocates public ownership of the means of production, while fascism advocates strongly regulated private ownership of the means of production (what you called "state capitalism" above).
Same problem here as we started with, except now you're explicitly spelling out the contradiction. How is private ownership of the means of the production -- presumably here meaning by a relatively few parties, not widely distributed -- allowing those parties to collect an unearned income in virtue of that ownership, at all in line with the goal of eliminating unearned income and distributing wealth more fairly? Fascism is all about the former, and so cannot be about the latter, and the whole thing smells of a politically motivated attempt to equate socialism with fascism.
"Libertarian socialism" would be a society in which people voluntarily behave according to socialist principles; there is a better name for that society, it's called "communism", and it's Marx's hypothetical endpoint of history. It doesn't exist.
And the concept of "free market socialism" makes no sense: the whole point of socialism is public ownership of the means of production. You can't have that and simultaneously have anything like a free market.
Picture a society where ownership of the means of production is widely and fairly evenly distributed -- in individual hands, not through the government. People are allowed to buy or sell things voluntarily, on terms they agree upon. But there is no mechanism whereby having a capital advantages allows you to perpetually increase your capital advantage -- there are no means of collecting an unearned income, whatever those means may be -- so "despite" that free trade, ownership of the means of production stays widely and fairly evenly distributed, in proportion to the actual work that people do, as valued by the rest of the market. That is libertarian socialism, or free market socialism. There is nothing inherently contradictory in it.
In fact it's just what you would naively expect any free market to be like: those with wealth trade it to those without for their labor to save themselves labor, and in the process wealth naturally trickles down increasing the wealth of the laborers who can then labor a little less while those who had wealth now need to labor some more to get more wealth themselves, and everybody has to work for a living and everybody has some share of the wealth in proportion to their labor (since in absence of differences in labor the wealth levels would naturally equalize). What throws a wrench in that whole beautiful idea is anything that allows those who already have wealth to siphon off the wealth of those who already lack it, getting back what they paid for labor so they can pay for it all over again, and keeping those who already lacked it perpetually lacking it and so subservient to those who already had it. It turns what should be a "water seeking its own level" flow of work and resources into a never-ending waterfall, a perpetual motion machine of injustice.
The trick is in figuring out what exactly is the means by which capitalists are able to leverage an unearned income, so you can get rid of that. State socialists don't fix that problem, they just take from those who have
I think you've mistaken me for someone who is defending statism of any form. Statism in any form is bad.
But statism explicitly entrenching inequalities, as in fascism, is bad on top of bad, when contrasted with a state actually working toward equality. Not that it often actually does, because authority breeds inequality just as much as inequality breeds authority. Statism tends toward state capitalism, not socialism; capitalism tends toward state capitalism, not libertarianism. The general tendency is always toward authority and inequality. Fascism, or feudalism in its preindustrial form, is the lowest ground that we continually fall toward when we lose the fight for liberty and equality, which must be fought for together because a deficit in either will lead to a deficit in the other.
Also, for what it's worth, Stalinism and its derivatives were generally considered, sometimes by themselves and usually by other contemporary socialists and communists, to be forms of state capitalism ostensibly as a transitional form on the way to state socialism and then later communism, i.e. basically openly operating "temporarily" as fascists, in the name of (i.e. to further the cause of) communism. So all those things were done by fascists, just "instrumental" fascists rather than "ideological" ones.
Whom (fascists), you'll note, I agree are the worst.
Probably the primary ideological idea of fascism is a rejection of capitalism and unearned income, and demands for a "fair" redistribution of wealth
Where the hell are you getting that shit from? The core concept of fascism is state capitalism: the collusion of the state and business capital, with the state picking winners and propping up monolithic leaders of different industries, eliminating fair competition, etc, in the process, all "for the good" of the nation as some top-down unified whole, but with equality no part of the equation -- there are big winners and big losers, but the state picks who is who. Mussolini, who coined the term, said himself that it might better have been called corporatism.
The rejection of unearned income (which, not free markets, is the defining characteristic of capitalism), and the aim of a fairer distribution of wealth, is not fascism but socialism (which, mind you, need not be statist; there is such a thing as libertarian socialism, or free market socialism). It sounds to me like you just think those words mean the same thing, because in your mind socialism = statism and statism = fascism, when in reality statism vs libertarianism and capitalism vs socialism are orthogonal issues, and fascism is the corner of the resultant grid where statism meets capitalism, the worst of both worlds. Neither state socialism nor libertarian capitalism are its opposite; libertarian socialism is.
Since nobody can afford to own their own home anymore, and there's no social safety nets, and all the jobs are being automated, so everyone will just get kicked out of their rented homes and die in the streets en masse.
Yes, because the best solution to this problem is to relocate tens of millions of people. That's totally a feasible thing to suggest, to just mostly empty out the third largest and most populous state in the entire country. That's not crazy at all.
Because the only reason to live anywhere in an enormous geographical area is because your job is there, and not because you, like tens of millions of other people, were born and raised there and all your family and friends and loved ones and your entire life is there?
Why don't all retired Brits leave the UK and move to eastern Europe somewhere that it's much cheaper? That's about the same scale we're talking here.
That's why I said:
If you retire with $500k in spending cash and a paid-off house then yeah that works our pretty well, but then you just went and doubled the amount you need to retire.
But unless you have an odball definition of filthy stinking rich, "miserable poverty" is not the only alternative.
That's why "rich" was in quotes. The closest alternative to miserably poverty, a moderately safe life where you're not constantly having to bribe other people to let you exist in their space (renting, be it land or money to buy land) and have savings beyond that to cushion your fall once you're unable to work, which should be a reasonable standard of living that almost everyone should be able to expect in the modern developed world, is in fact a standard of living far and beyond the reaches of the vast majority of the country today.
I make more money than 75% of individual Americans, live more cheaply than most of them, and it's still looking like I might only finish step one (pay off a house) just in time to die, unless I either move to a shit hole in the middle of nowhere (where almost nobody lives, for good reason), or else move to what may as well be a different country (where many fewer people than all the people poorer than me in my area live, so not something reasonable to expect of me unless you expect almost the entirety of California to leave the state too), in either case abandoning everyone and everything I know and love, just for a chance to live a life not worth living, having given all of that up to attain it. And 75% of Americans are worse off than that. We're all well and truly fucked, except those who were born early enough and had opportunity and foresight enough to hop on the real estate train before it pulled away and abandoned entire generations to a miserable inevitable death.
not in california, where that wont buy an empty plot of land anywhere but the middle of the fucking desert
For someone living in a median house in the most populous state in the country, $25k/year will barely cover the mortgage.
If you retire with $500k in spending cash and a paid-off house then yeah that works our pretty well, but then you just went and doubled the amount you need to retire.
Yes thank you, that was the point I was making rhetorically to the obviously-right-wing person I was replying to. Such right-wingers have a conundrum: private "public squares" on the internet exhibit what they perceive as left-wing bias. But the alternative, truly public (government-owned) "public squares", are inherently contrary to right-wing anti-government ideology, just by their very existence.
A lot of happy poor people are happy because they're living in the moment and not worrying about the future, and poor for the same exact reason. I grew up with a carefree, I'm-awesome-the-world-is-fundamentally-good-and-everything-will-work-out-for-me-somehow attitude. That plunged me into abject poverty the moment I hit adulthood. I thought for a while it was a run of bad luck, just a bunch of unfortunate problems for me personally that weren't my fault and weren't indicative of the state of the world, and things would get better, and so long as stuff wasn't actively bad right now I was happy-go-lucky again.
After enough of that shit for long enough I realized that life is naturally shit, almost everybody fails constantly at every aspect of it, and you have to nut the fuck up and constantly work your goddamn balls off at kicking its fucking ass or else such "strings of bad luck" will destroy the entire rest of your life. Now I'm a moderately well-to-do but miserable, stressed out, angry "workaholic" as far as my lazy happy-go-lucky perpetually-in-poverty family are concerned, except I don't like working, I fucking hate it, I am working so fucking hard so that someday, maybe, someday I will be able to actually have the security I naively thought was the natural state of the world when I was young, and then, and only then, will I maybe be able to relax again and kick back and be happy, because even if I quit doing the stress-induced "workaholic" shit right now, even if I tried living like I was happy-go-lucky again, I couldn't actually be happy because now I know that there is going to be another "unfortunate disaster" right around the fucking corner any goddamn minute and I am not safe from it yet, maybe I'm safe from one or two by now but not long term, "relaxing" just means wearing away the tiny buffer between me and poverty that all my hard work has managed to achieve, and would do nothing but make waste all of that effort.
There are lot of people out there who are dirt poor, old, and just barely surviving by a thread, and only thanks to the sliver of social safety net we still have left. My parents are both among them, with my dad living in a falling-apart trailer on land that he's constantly on the verge of losing for tax or inspection reasons, and my mom drifting from one shithole bedroom shared with two other people to another. They've both got flaws that I could blame them both for their own circumstances, but then they also both made plenty of money in their prime, I'm told money comparable to what I'm making now, which the statistics tell me is about twice what the median individual American makes (or about the median American household). I live in a tiny trailer myself to save on rent, live a lifestyle that everyone I know describes as too cheap (refraining from buying fairly ordinary things most people have that "I can afford" but don't strictly need because having that money in the future is more important) and save pretty much every other paycheck, frantically trying to avoid their fate, but when I do the math I'm still not sure it's going to work out. If I'm lucky, our social safety nets will still exist when the time comes, and my own preparation will actually make for a nice retirement, but I'm not counting on it -- and if I lived like my parents, I'd probably starve or die of exposure at their age. And they're not even retirement age yet!
Most people die miserable in poverty and you have to be filthy stinking "rich" to have any hope of avoiding that.