Capitalism is not just private ownership and operation of property. That's propertarianism. You can have that, and a free market, and still not have capitalism, if capital ownership doesn't create an exploitable advantage in the market. (How to do that is an open question, but it's conceivable).
So are they basically just selling the house at a much higher price? Does the bank then have to buy the house from the seller first and then resell it to the buyer to accomplish that?
The Wikipedia article on libertarian socialism gives a good overview itself and has an extensive external links section with further resources. One other topic that I find particularly lacking from that though is distributism, but it's got its own good article with further reading too. I should note however that there are a lot of different variant strains of thought in that general area of libertarian socialism, and that I personally don't agree entirely with any one of them; I think they've all got some nice ideas but also their own share of flaws. I just like the general approach and wish there would be more mainstream dialogue with these kinds of ideas.
My personal flavor is essentially the same as the usual right-libertarian concept of a propertarian free market (that is to say, a market where rights to private property ownership are recognized), minus contracts of rent (including interest) —possibly minus contracts in general (besides simple transfers of ownership), but I'm less certain on that point — because I believe rent and interest are what cause the runaway concentration of wealth that turns a free market capitalistic, and that without them there would be a natural tendency for wealth to flow from those with more to those with less (the natural cost of the leisure those with more wish to enjoy); and that rent and interest can be abolished as widespread economic instruments without the use of any kind of authoritarian force, simply by refraining from the current use of authoritarian force to enforce such contracts, leaving such arrangements legally unprotected and thus unsuitable for general use as economic instruments (but still strictly speaking legal for trustworthy partners to engage in themselves if they choose).
Self-employment wasn't meant to be a necessary criterion, but sort of a fast and loose way of describing a level of capital ownership, alongside things like homeownership. Stock ownership is a form of business ownership that doesn't require you to be "self-employed". For class-determining purposes it doesn't have to be stock in the business that employs you, either. Just so long as you're getting some of the benefits of being "the employer" (if indirectly by being part-owner of some employers of someone), but can't just float on those proceeds and do actually still need to work.
That's all really much less important than things like homeownership though, which is where I'm really thinking about the class division in a paradigmatic way. If you don't own real property and have to borrow someone else's to live in, and work constantly independent of whatever resources you consume just to get money to service the debt you owe (rent) on that borrowed property, you're clearly lower class. If you own so much property that you can let others borrow it (rent it out) and live off the proceeds from that to cover your consumption rather than having to work for that money, then you're clearly upper class. If you're in neither of those scenarios, you're possibly middle class, unless you're in an analogous scenario to one of those two just regarding some kind of capital other than your home.
(E.g. a homeowner who is in terrible debt otherwise is still clearly lower class because they're still having to borrow capital; a homeowner who doesn't have any rental properties but still lives off of stock dividends instead of working is still clearly upper class. And of course different positions with regards to different kinds of capital may cancel out; someone who doesn't own their home but has stock dividends sufficient to pay their rent, and otherwise has to work to cover their consumption, is pretty much as middle-class as a homeowner is.)
What metric are you using to define middle class, and furthermore, where exactly does the goalpost reside, and how often does that goalpost change?
The bulk of my post was explaining this.
Middle-class means you're neither in the exploited labor class nor the exploitative capitalist class. You've got capital enough that you're not dependent on the capital of others, and can work only for the resources you consume, not to service debts to those wealthier than you; but you don't have capital enough to live off others who are dependent on you for it, and have to work at least for the resources you consume, even if not to services debts to those wealthier than you.
Income has nothing to do with it. Income is a side-effect. It's about assets.
Capitalism is not the 'temporary use of another class's capital.' It is a system where property is freely bought and sold.
You're conflating capitalism with a free market. They are not synonyms.
A free market is a system where property is freely bought and sold.
Capitalism is a system where the shape of the market is determined primarily by the prior distribution of capital; loosely put, where having wealth makes it easier to keep and obtain wealth, and lacking it makes it harder to keep or obtain it, automatically perpetuating that wealth disparity and leaving the less-wealthy perpetually subservient to the more-wealthy.
For a trivial example of a free market which is not capitalist, consider any market that deals exclusively in labor services, such as an virtual market online (without copyright interfering to create artificial scarcity) or a hypothetical post-scarcity market in the future; anywhere that capital is either freely and infinitely replicable or else just irrelevant. Because capital is not involved, the market is not shaped by capital distribution, and is thus not capitalist. But it can nevertheless still be a free market, with the prices of the services being traded determined entirely by voluntary agreement with no redistribution of profits or anything.
Less trivially, a real-world market, dealing with goods and services both, that had an even distribution of capital would not, at least initially, be capitalist, as nobody would have a capital advantage over anyone else to exploit. The open question is whether such non-capitalist freedom is sustainable, or whether we're forced to choose between either sacrificing freedom or accepting capitalism.
Free markets are the kind of thing that early liberals (what would now be called "libertarians") like Adam Smith and John Locke advocated.
Capitalism is something that was first identified and named by Marx, who in turn claimed that it was an inevitable consequence of free markets, a claim that the state socialists who followed in his wake accepted and spread further.
Even more distressingly though, their opponents in defense of free markets also tacitly accepted that claim (that free markets inevitably lead to capitalism), and just disagreed on which side of the resulting fork to choose: reject free markets to avoid capitalism, or embrace capitalism to preserve free markets.
Meanwhile, nobody noticed (and today most people can barely even conceive) the libertarian socialists who disagreed with Marx's claim that you can't have free markets without capitalism, who have been to this day discussing (not that anybody else is listening) possible ways to prevent capitalism without sacrificing the free market.
Just thought you'd like to know that when you say things like "[capitalism] is a system where property is freely bought and sold", you are tacitly buying into Marxist rhetoric.
Since a large portion of the lower income population rents
Those people are by definition not middle class, as they are having to borrow capital — land to live on — from those who have more capital than them (their landlords), and labor for others with more capital than them (their employers) to get the money to pay for that. They don't have enough capital to just labor to obtain the resources they consume; they also have to labor extra to borrow capital from others. That a large portion of people are stuck in that situation, and thus not middle class, is precisely the point I'm making.
How the hell are the poor schmucks stuck renting a bedroom in someone else's house going to get their hands on even bare land, much less the tools and materials needed to do anything productive with it? Land is about the most expensive thing there is. If everyone owned their own land we wouldn't be in this problem — people wouldn't have to worry about putting up with their shit jobs just to make rent and not get thrown immediately out into the street. People would have a leg to stand on, economically, and could actually bargain for a fair value for their labor because they wouldn't be entirely dependent on borrowing other people's capital (like land to live on) just to survive another day.
Re: Software is the wrong villian here.
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The Software Revolution
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Christian law also prohibited usury for the longest time. (Until around the Protestant Reformation).
It's the reason Jews were villainized as greedy schemers: Christians (in Christian lands) were legally prohibited from lending at interest, but Jews (not being bound by Christian law) could, meaning that they were the only ones doing it, and getting all the flak for it.
Even then though, and still today in the Muslim world, there were complicated work-arounds involving a combination of an "interest-free" loan, insurance, and rental, which created in effect a loan at interest, and is part of why the Christian world eventually let up on prohibitions of usury, because it was effectively happening anyway despite the prohibition of it. The loophole there, as I see it, was failing to see that rent is precisely the same thing as lending at interest, or rather, that interest is a special case of rent: it's just rent on money.
In any case you're lending capital temporarily in exchange for a permanent transfer of even greater capital back to you, which causes the problem of wealth concentration, redistributing wealth from those who have less of it (and thus need to borrow it) to those who have more of it already (and thus can afford to lend it out), which has the secondary effect of requiring those with less of it to labor for those with more of it in order to continue borrowing to survive, in effect creating perpetual servitude of a working class to an owning class.
And when technological revolutions make labor less valuable, that kind of class division becomes unsustainable, and either the working class has to just die off, or take some capital for themselves by force —unless everyone can see the undesirability of either of those outcomes, and change the system somehow to let the capital flow back from the leisure class to the labor class, as it naturally would without such concentrating influences as rent and interest.
You're right that wealth isn't money and that classes are defined by wealth not money, and I don't have anything to say about whether the middle class as defined by actual wealth is shrinking or growing, but it is very clear that a majority of people are not middle class in terms of wealth, and that's a present problem, whether it's getting worse or better.
The middle class are those who have enough productive capital to make their own living without having to constantly borrow it from others at the cost of their labor — that is, those who aren't pure subservient laborers, those who own their own homes and businesses and such outright, who are their own "bosses" and "landlords", independent of others in those roles — but who yet don't have so much capital that they can subsist entirely off the labor of others in exchange for the lending of that capital, and still have to labor themselves — that is, those who aren't capitalists (in the original sense of "owning class", not "supporter of capitalism").
It's terribly difficult to find statistics on how many people own their own homes at all (much less own them outright), as the most common figures speak only of how many homes are owner-occupied (which is not the same thing), but it's clear just from looking at some monetary statistics — the median income is about $25k, and the median home price is about $200k — that most people cannot afford their own homes, and so are not by any measure middle-class.
Amazing that you can twist an impending failure of capitalism and the predictable consequent social upheaval to follow as somehow the fault of "socialist" social engineering and something those socialists have been trying to cause, rather than something they've been warning about and trying to avoid.
The only way society can continue to function as there is less and less value to human labor is for the productive capital to become more evenly distributed. There are lots of ways that could happen, from one extreme of just letting the poor die so only the wealthy capital-owners and the robots that support them remain (with the capital more evenly distributed amongst that now-smaller population), to another extreme of those poor rising up with their torches and pitchforks and taking the productive capital by force (the bogeyman you're afraid of), and a lot of less terrible possibilities in between those extremes.
But one way or another, an economic system that hinges entirely on one class trading their labor for the temporary use of the capital of another class (capitalism) simply cannot continue to function when the value of labor drops toward zero.
Thats why the best communities are those where comments are rated not by whether people agree with them, but by whether they are of discursive merit regardless of content: well-reasoned, polite, respectful, etc. That is why slashdot here has moderations like 'insightful' and 'flamebait' but not 'agree' or 'disagree'. So we can still preserve a quality of discourse with a variety of opinions, instead of either an echochamber or an unruly mob.
Of course that is really dependent on the people, not the software. The software can at best encourage behavior, but if people want to they can still abuse 'informative' as 'I agree' or 'overrated' as 'disagree'. Like all communities, everything depends on the quality of the people.
If "websites remain the private property of a privileged few", it's a good thing they're so stupidly cheap to buy. Costs more to do laundry than to host your own site and do whatever the fuck you want with it, moderation-free.
Just wanted to say hi to a fellow take-in-new-information-and-change-opinions person. There need to be more of us, or if there are more of us already, we need to be more vocal, so the world knows both that it's OK to be reasonable (lots of people are doing it!) and more especially that reason will can actually get you somewhere with people.
My personal history: I started out, when I was very young, assuming that someone was obviously in charge of the whole world and all that was needed to make things better was to get whoever was in charge to do it, or put someone new in charge who would do it; to make things more fair, thoughts like "if society is going to be designed such that you need a car to function in it, then cars should be given to everyone when they're old enough to need them, otherwise it's just not fair". I was basically (and called myself) a straight up communist.
In my teens my perspective shifted as I realized that there really isn't and actually can't be anybody in charge setting up "the system" as a whole, there are just a bunch if interacting individuals and any system that there might be emerges organically from their interactions, so the best we can do is just keep people from trampling over each other, protect individuals' rights, and leave them to their self-determination. I considered myself a libertarian then.
Then as I became an adult and had to actually get by in the real world on my own, I realized like you that even given ideal libertarian freedom, success and failure are frequently, I'd say even predominantly, highly uncorrelated with hard work and skill. There is random chance to factor in, like you point out, and I've been hit with more than my fair share of bad luck to prove that point to me, but there are also systematic factors allowed by traditional American right-libertarianism that perpetuate inequalities, giving a hand up to those who need it least, and holding down those in greatest need.
In the years since then I've looked for other alternatives, finding some sympathy for left-libertarianism a.k.a. libertarian socialism, which is a term I now apply to myself in lieu of any other, although I am still strongly propertarian in contrast to them. I am also very sympathetic to distributivism and it's motto that "the problem with capitalism is not that there are too many capitalists, but that there are too few", i.e. purely free markets would work great if there were a society where everyone owned e.g. their own homes and businesses, and not a class division between the non-working owners and the non-owning workers. I mostly focus on contracts of rent (including the special case of rent on money, interest), and possibly contracts in general (besides transfers of ownership), as the root of the problems with traditional American right-libertarianism, and have extensive original arguments on how they perpetuate that owner/worker class division that would otherwise naturally dissolve in a truly free market, and thus how broadly libertarian ideals could be realized while still achieving socialist (egalitarian) ends, if only that feature (rent and interest) was omitted.
But I've also had to learn to separate idealism from pragmatism. I don't have any party I can get behind when it comes to representing my ideals, because they require refactoring large social structures in ways that most Americans simple cannot conceive ("libertarian socialist" being a blatant contradiction in their minds, never mind things like "stateless governance"). But that's all long-term, and the only work that can really be done there is to spread the ideas. In the short term, practical considerations outweigh ideals, especially since one way or another the ideals simply are not going to be realized in my lifetime. So in the short term, I've backed away from my libertarianism and accepted some more mainstream state-socialist concepts as the best thing that we can do right now with the political climate what it is, though that "best" is still informed by libertarian ideals. Things like: gi
I think you already answered your own question as to why Republicans would be behind a measure like this. They are generally anti-immigration. Normally I would find that a problem but in this case it seems to be right on the money.
(My general opinion on immigration is that anyone should be allowed into the country but then subject to exactly the same rights and responsibilities as citizens, so the immigrants don't get a free ride on the backs of citizen taxpayers, and employers don't get an exploitable underclass to undermine those very same citizens. It's fine to have open borders so long as everyone is treated equally; the problem is when the immigrants lack either the rights or the responsibilities of citizens, allowing them to exploit or to be exploited, in either way at a loss to the general citizenry).
By "reasonable person" here I mean a person responsive to the evidence. Someone who would give some criteria for evidence that would change their mind, and merely thinks that those criteria are not yet met. As opposed to someone who simply cannot conceive of anything ever changing their mind.
For a personal example, I am an atheist, and I can easily conceive of something that would convince me that something people would probably call God existed. I would still quibble about whether that appellation is correct, and what the proper response to the existence of such a being would be, and there are some senses of the term that by their definition could not be put to the test either way and so those such concepts are inherently religious (and I'd argue practically meaningless), but if you just meant something like an extremely powerful, extremely knowledgeable, and extremely benevolent being (proving "all" in any of those cases is logically impossible), then yeah, I can easily imagine seeing evidence that would convince me of it. That evidence just isn't available.
On the other hand, I've met plenty of religious people who, when presented with something like the Problem of Evil (the existence of evil is evidence that any God that might exist either can't, won't, or doesn't know he needs to do anything about it, and in any of those cases shouldn't count as God anymore), have no counterargument but just brush it off and continue believing what they want, unresponsive to reason. (There are other people who try to offer reasoned rebuttals, and though I've found all such reasoning wanting, I have respect that they're at least trying to be reasonable, even if they're failing at it; usually, their failure is offering a rebuttal which then makes the question undeterminable and thus requires the abandonment of reason for believer or skeptic alike). The unreasonableness comes when their beliefs are not compelled one way or another by the evidence, but selected because they or their consequences are more desirable than the alternative.
In the case of climate change, I've not dug into the question much because the popular debate surrounding it seems polarized between people who are both attached to their answers because of the desirability of their consequences, rather than being compelled by the evidence. But I trust the scientific community as a whole at least to be compelled by the evidence, even if not their politically-charged fans. It looks to me, from a distance, like one side is firmly (I'll even say religiously) attached to the premise that if climate change is happening —as they agree it is — then certain forms of government intervention are warranted; the other side in turn thinks such government intervention is never warranted and concludes via modus tollens that climate change must not be happening. Not that I think they're being explicit, even to themselves, about that line of reasoning. But they seem to be choosing what facts to accept based on the desirability of their supposed consequences, and thus being unreasonable. (The implication of those consequences from the facts is itself another form of unreasonability, in that it's inferring an "ought" from an "is", but that's shared by both sides).
If it is given that something is happening, there are always many different things that could be done in response to it.
In the case of global warming, there are the political responses you can't imagine other than; there are technological advances to be investigated that you mention nevertheless; there's always the option of individual people adapting individually to the problem as it begins to affect them (people on low-lying beaches relocating inland as sea levels rise, farmers relocating toward the poles as arable areas change, etc).
Whether the problem exists and what the proper response to it would be if it did should always be kept separate questions, otherwise you get nonsense like we're seeing where agreement on factual matters is determined by agreement on normative ones. But one never directly implies the other. This is basic philosophy at least as old as Hume.
It may be that the question is not religious, but the person in question holds a religious conviction in their chosen answer.
If there is no way to gather evidence to conclusive determine the answer for any reasonable person, then the question is religious, because nobody can do anything but assume an answer on faith.
If there is a way to gather evidence that would conclusively determine the answer for some reasonable people, but then other unreasonable people simply will not change their minds no matter what evidence you show them, then the latter people are religious, but not the question itself.
Yes, but the key words there are "knocking" and "asking". Those are the important steps people want police to have to do. (And getting proper permission to do that first, and showing proof that they got that permission when they do it). I'm sure the people you're thinking of who aren't grievously offended by that behavior would still be offended if the cops could just walk into their house without knocking or asking, even if that walking-in didn't have to involve kicking the door down; say for example the cops had some kind of universal door key. That's what the radar is like. Except, it's like the cops walking in the door with the universal door key are also invisible, so you don't even know they're there. People want to know that the cops are there and that they have gone through due process first, rather than just suddenly having them in their homes.
Because the radar just gives them the results of kicking the door down without them having to lift a boot. It's not the kicking that people want to stop, it's what the kicking is done for: invading the privacy of their homes, without due process or even the decency to show proof that due process has in fact been done before invading. Cops being able to see into your house from the outside whenever they want is just as bad as cops being able to bust into your house whenever they want. Both breech the expected and due privacy of the home.
The only person I've known very well in person who held that "love the sinner, hate the sin" attitude had a relationship with me that sounds similar to yours and your wife's (though not romantic). She was also Catholic, and I am also atheist, and as mentioned before queer myself, and when the topic came up she would politely, almost bashfully mention that "well, I don't really approve of that, but it's your life", and if the topic didn't come up (which it rarely ever did), I could completely forget that she even politely disapproved of anything about me. Her disapproval of my sexuality seemed exactly the same as my disapproval of her religion: "you're free to be wrong if you like, not my business unless you make it my business".
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Capitalism is not just private ownership and operation of property. That's propertarianism. You can have that, and a free market, and still not have capitalism, if capital ownership doesn't create an exploitable advantage in the market. (How to do that is an open question, but it's conceivable).
Thank you, you took the words out of my mouth.
Dictionaries are terrible sources for technical definitions.
Dictionaries accurately report that many people use them as though they're synonyms.
They have nothing to say about whether that use is right or wrong, just that it happens.
So are they basically just selling the house at a much higher price? Does the bank then have to buy the house from the seller first and then resell it to the buyer to accomplish that?
The Wikipedia article on libertarian socialism gives a good overview itself and has an extensive external links section with further resources. One other topic that I find particularly lacking from that though is distributism, but it's got its own good article with further reading too. I should note however that there are a lot of different variant strains of thought in that general area of libertarian socialism, and that I personally don't agree entirely with any one of them; I think they've all got some nice ideas but also their own share of flaws. I just like the general approach and wish there would be more mainstream dialogue with these kinds of ideas.
My personal flavor is essentially the same as the usual right-libertarian concept of a propertarian free market (that is to say, a market where rights to private property ownership are recognized), minus contracts of rent (including interest) —possibly minus contracts in general (besides simple transfers of ownership), but I'm less certain on that point — because I believe rent and interest are what cause the runaway concentration of wealth that turns a free market capitalistic, and that without them there would be a natural tendency for wealth to flow from those with more to those with less (the natural cost of the leisure those with more wish to enjoy); and that rent and interest can be abolished as widespread economic instruments without the use of any kind of authoritarian force, simply by refraining from the current use of authoritarian force to enforce such contracts, leaving such arrangements legally unprotected and thus unsuitable for general use as economic instruments (but still strictly speaking legal for trustworthy partners to engage in themselves if they choose).
Self-employment wasn't meant to be a necessary criterion, but sort of a fast and loose way of describing a level of capital ownership, alongside things like homeownership. Stock ownership is a form of business ownership that doesn't require you to be "self-employed". For class-determining purposes it doesn't have to be stock in the business that employs you, either. Just so long as you're getting some of the benefits of being "the employer" (if indirectly by being part-owner of some employers of someone), but can't just float on those proceeds and do actually still need to work.
That's all really much less important than things like homeownership though, which is where I'm really thinking about the class division in a paradigmatic way. If you don't own real property and have to borrow someone else's to live in, and work constantly independent of whatever resources you consume just to get money to service the debt you owe (rent) on that borrowed property, you're clearly lower class. If you own so much property that you can let others borrow it (rent it out) and live off the proceeds from that to cover your consumption rather than having to work for that money, then you're clearly upper class. If you're in neither of those scenarios, you're possibly middle class, unless you're in an analogous scenario to one of those two just regarding some kind of capital other than your home.
(E.g. a homeowner who is in terrible debt otherwise is still clearly lower class because they're still having to borrow capital; a homeowner who doesn't have any rental properties but still lives off of stock dividends instead of working is still clearly upper class. And of course different positions with regards to different kinds of capital may cancel out; someone who doesn't own their home but has stock dividends sufficient to pay their rent, and otherwise has to work to cover their consumption, is pretty much as middle-class as a homeowner is.)
What metric are you using to define middle class, and furthermore, where exactly does the goalpost reside, and how often does that goalpost change?
The bulk of my post was explaining this.
Middle-class means you're neither in the exploited labor class nor the exploitative capitalist class. You've got capital enough that you're not dependent on the capital of others, and can work only for the resources you consume, not to service debts to those wealthier than you; but you don't have capital enough to live off others who are dependent on you for it, and have to work at least for the resources you consume, even if not to services debts to those wealthier than you.
Income has nothing to do with it. Income is a side-effect. It's about assets.
Capitalism is not the 'temporary use of another class's capital.' It is a system where property is freely bought and sold.
You're conflating capitalism with a free market. They are not synonyms.
A free market is a system where property is freely bought and sold.
Capitalism is a system where the shape of the market is determined primarily by the prior distribution of capital; loosely put, where having wealth makes it easier to keep and obtain wealth, and lacking it makes it harder to keep or obtain it, automatically perpetuating that wealth disparity and leaving the less-wealthy perpetually subservient to the more-wealthy.
For a trivial example of a free market which is not capitalist, consider any market that deals exclusively in labor services, such as an virtual market online (without copyright interfering to create artificial scarcity) or a hypothetical post-scarcity market in the future; anywhere that capital is either freely and infinitely replicable or else just irrelevant. Because capital is not involved, the market is not shaped by capital distribution, and is thus not capitalist. But it can nevertheless still be a free market, with the prices of the services being traded determined entirely by voluntary agreement with no redistribution of profits or anything.
Less trivially, a real-world market, dealing with goods and services both, that had an even distribution of capital would not, at least initially, be capitalist, as nobody would have a capital advantage over anyone else to exploit. The open question is whether such non-capitalist freedom is sustainable, or whether we're forced to choose between either sacrificing freedom or accepting capitalism.
Free markets are the kind of thing that early liberals (what would now be called "libertarians") like Adam Smith and John Locke advocated.
Capitalism is something that was first identified and named by Marx, who in turn claimed that it was an inevitable consequence of free markets, a claim that the state socialists who followed in his wake accepted and spread further.
Even more distressingly though, their opponents in defense of free markets also tacitly accepted that claim (that free markets inevitably lead to capitalism), and just disagreed on which side of the resulting fork to choose: reject free markets to avoid capitalism, or embrace capitalism to preserve free markets.
Meanwhile, nobody noticed (and today most people can barely even conceive) the libertarian socialists who disagreed with Marx's claim that you can't have free markets without capitalism, who have been to this day discussing (not that anybody else is listening) possible ways to prevent capitalism without sacrificing the free market.
Just thought you'd like to know that when you say things like "[capitalism] is a system where property is freely bought and sold", you are tacitly buying into Marxist rhetoric.
Since a large portion of the lower income population rents
Those people are by definition not middle class, as they are having to borrow capital — land to live on — from those who have more capital than them (their landlords), and labor for others with more capital than them (their employers) to get the money to pay for that. They don't have enough capital to just labor to obtain the resources they consume; they also have to labor extra to borrow capital from others. That a large portion of people are stuck in that situation, and thus not middle class, is precisely the point I'm making.
How the hell are the poor schmucks stuck renting a bedroom in someone else's house going to get their hands on even bare land, much less the tools and materials needed to do anything productive with it? Land is about the most expensive thing there is. If everyone owned their own land we wouldn't be in this problem — people wouldn't have to worry about putting up with their shit jobs just to make rent and not get thrown immediately out into the street. People would have a leg to stand on, economically, and could actually bargain for a fair value for their labor because they wouldn't be entirely dependent on borrowing other people's capital (like land to live on) just to survive another day.
Christian law also prohibited usury for the longest time. (Until around the Protestant Reformation).
It's the reason Jews were villainized as greedy schemers: Christians (in Christian lands) were legally prohibited from lending at interest, but Jews (not being bound by Christian law) could, meaning that they were the only ones doing it, and getting all the flak for it.
Even then though, and still today in the Muslim world, there were complicated work-arounds involving a combination of an "interest-free" loan, insurance, and rental, which created in effect a loan at interest, and is part of why the Christian world eventually let up on prohibitions of usury, because it was effectively happening anyway despite the prohibition of it. The loophole there, as I see it, was failing to see that rent is precisely the same thing as lending at interest, or rather, that interest is a special case of rent: it's just rent on money.
In any case you're lending capital temporarily in exchange for a permanent transfer of even greater capital back to you, which causes the problem of wealth concentration, redistributing wealth from those who have less of it (and thus need to borrow it) to those who have more of it already (and thus can afford to lend it out), which has the secondary effect of requiring those with less of it to labor for those with more of it in order to continue borrowing to survive, in effect creating perpetual servitude of a working class to an owning class.
And when technological revolutions make labor less valuable, that kind of class division becomes unsustainable, and either the working class has to just die off, or take some capital for themselves by force —unless everyone can see the undesirability of either of those outcomes, and change the system somehow to let the capital flow back from the leisure class to the labor class, as it naturally would without such concentrating influences as rent and interest.
You're right that wealth isn't money and that classes are defined by wealth not money, and I don't have anything to say about whether the middle class as defined by actual wealth is shrinking or growing, but it is very clear that a majority of people are not middle class in terms of wealth, and that's a present problem, whether it's getting worse or better.
The middle class are those who have enough productive capital to make their own living without having to constantly borrow it from others at the cost of their labor — that is, those who aren't pure subservient laborers, those who own their own homes and businesses and such outright, who are their own "bosses" and "landlords", independent of others in those roles — but who yet don't have so much capital that they can subsist entirely off the labor of others in exchange for the lending of that capital, and still have to labor themselves — that is, those who aren't capitalists (in the original sense of "owning class", not "supporter of capitalism").
It's terribly difficult to find statistics on how many people own their own homes at all (much less own them outright), as the most common figures speak only of how many homes are owner-occupied (which is not the same thing), but it's clear just from looking at some monetary statistics — the median income is about $25k, and the median home price is about $200k — that most people cannot afford their own homes, and so are not by any measure middle-class.
Amazing that you can twist an impending failure of capitalism and the predictable consequent social upheaval to follow as somehow the fault of "socialist" social engineering and something those socialists have been trying to cause, rather than something they've been warning about and trying to avoid.
The only way society can continue to function as there is less and less value to human labor is for the productive capital to become more evenly distributed. There are lots of ways that could happen, from one extreme of just letting the poor die so only the wealthy capital-owners and the robots that support them remain (with the capital more evenly distributed amongst that now-smaller population), to another extreme of those poor rising up with their torches and pitchforks and taking the productive capital by force (the bogeyman you're afraid of), and a lot of less terrible possibilities in between those extremes.
But one way or another, an economic system that hinges entirely on one class trading their labor for the temporary use of the capital of another class (capitalism) simply cannot continue to function when the value of labor drops toward zero.
Which is totally possible if the site is in gradual decline.
Thats why the best communities are those where comments are rated not by whether people agree with them, but by whether they are of discursive merit regardless of content: well-reasoned, polite, respectful, etc. That is why slashdot here has moderations like 'insightful' and 'flamebait' but not 'agree' or 'disagree'. So we can still preserve a quality of discourse with a variety of opinions, instead of either an echochamber or an unruly mob.
Of course that is really dependent on the people, not the software. The software can at best encourage behavior, but if people want to they can still abuse 'informative' as 'I agree' or 'overrated' as 'disagree'. Like all communities, everything depends on the quality of the people.
Downvotes are not censorship. Your posts is still there, available to anyone to read, just rated by the community as to how worth reading it is.
If "websites remain the private property of a privileged few", it's a good thing they're so stupidly cheap to buy. Costs more to do laundry than to host your own site and do whatever the fuck you want with it, moderation-free.
Just wanted to say hi to a fellow take-in-new-information-and-change-opinions person. There need to be more of us, or if there are more of us already, we need to be more vocal, so the world knows both that it's OK to be reasonable (lots of people are doing it!) and more especially that reason will can actually get you somewhere with people.
My personal history: I started out, when I was very young, assuming that someone was obviously in charge of the whole world and all that was needed to make things better was to get whoever was in charge to do it, or put someone new in charge who would do it; to make things more fair, thoughts like "if society is going to be designed such that you need a car to function in it, then cars should be given to everyone when they're old enough to need them, otherwise it's just not fair". I was basically (and called myself) a straight up communist.
In my teens my perspective shifted as I realized that there really isn't and actually can't be anybody in charge setting up "the system" as a whole, there are just a bunch if interacting individuals and any system that there might be emerges organically from their interactions, so the best we can do is just keep people from trampling over each other, protect individuals' rights, and leave them to their self-determination. I considered myself a libertarian then.
Then as I became an adult and had to actually get by in the real world on my own, I realized like you that even given ideal libertarian freedom, success and failure are frequently, I'd say even predominantly, highly uncorrelated with hard work and skill. There is random chance to factor in, like you point out, and I've been hit with more than my fair share of bad luck to prove that point to me, but there are also systematic factors allowed by traditional American right-libertarianism that perpetuate inequalities, giving a hand up to those who need it least, and holding down those in greatest need.
In the years since then I've looked for other alternatives, finding some sympathy for left-libertarianism a.k.a. libertarian socialism, which is a term I now apply to myself in lieu of any other, although I am still strongly propertarian in contrast to them. I am also very sympathetic to distributivism and it's motto that "the problem with capitalism is not that there are too many capitalists, but that there are too few", i.e. purely free markets would work great if there were a society where everyone owned e.g. their own homes and businesses, and not a class division between the non-working owners and the non-owning workers. I mostly focus on contracts of rent (including the special case of rent on money, interest), and possibly contracts in general (besides transfers of ownership), as the root of the problems with traditional American right-libertarianism, and have extensive original arguments on how they perpetuate that owner/worker class division that would otherwise naturally dissolve in a truly free market, and thus how broadly libertarian ideals could be realized while still achieving socialist (egalitarian) ends, if only that feature (rent and interest) was omitted.
But I've also had to learn to separate idealism from pragmatism. I don't have any party I can get behind when it comes to representing my ideals, because they require refactoring large social structures in ways that most Americans simple cannot conceive ("libertarian socialist" being a blatant contradiction in their minds, never mind things like "stateless governance"). But that's all long-term, and the only work that can really be done there is to spread the ideas. In the short term, practical considerations outweigh ideals, especially since one way or another the ideals simply are not going to be realized in my lifetime. So in the short term, I've backed away from my libertarianism and accepted some more mainstream state-socialist concepts as the best thing that we can do right now with the political climate what it is, though that "best" is still informed by libertarian ideals. Things like: gi
I think you already answered your own question as to why Republicans would be behind a measure like this. They are generally anti-immigration. Normally I would find that a problem but in this case it seems to be right on the money.
(My general opinion on immigration is that anyone should be allowed into the country but then subject to exactly the same rights and responsibilities as citizens, so the immigrants don't get a free ride on the backs of citizen taxpayers, and employers don't get an exploitable underclass to undermine those very same citizens. It's fine to have open borders so long as everyone is treated equally; the problem is when the immigrants lack either the rights or the responsibilities of citizens, allowing them to exploit or to be exploited, in either way at a loss to the general citizenry).
By "reasonable person" here I mean a person responsive to the evidence. Someone who would give some criteria for evidence that would change their mind, and merely thinks that those criteria are not yet met. As opposed to someone who simply cannot conceive of anything ever changing their mind.
For a personal example, I am an atheist, and I can easily conceive of something that would convince me that something people would probably call God existed. I would still quibble about whether that appellation is correct, and what the proper response to the existence of such a being would be, and there are some senses of the term that by their definition could not be put to the test either way and so those such concepts are inherently religious (and I'd argue practically meaningless), but if you just meant something like an extremely powerful, extremely knowledgeable, and extremely benevolent being (proving "all" in any of those cases is logically impossible), then yeah, I can easily imagine seeing evidence that would convince me of it. That evidence just isn't available.
On the other hand, I've met plenty of religious people who, when presented with something like the Problem of Evil (the existence of evil is evidence that any God that might exist either can't, won't, or doesn't know he needs to do anything about it, and in any of those cases shouldn't count as God anymore), have no counterargument but just brush it off and continue believing what they want, unresponsive to reason. (There are other people who try to offer reasoned rebuttals, and though I've found all such reasoning wanting, I have respect that they're at least trying to be reasonable, even if they're failing at it; usually, their failure is offering a rebuttal which then makes the question undeterminable and thus requires the abandonment of reason for believer or skeptic alike). The unreasonableness comes when their beliefs are not compelled one way or another by the evidence, but selected because they or their consequences are more desirable than the alternative.
In the case of climate change, I've not dug into the question much because the popular debate surrounding it seems polarized between people who are both attached to their answers because of the desirability of their consequences, rather than being compelled by the evidence. But I trust the scientific community as a whole at least to be compelled by the evidence, even if not their politically-charged fans. It looks to me, from a distance, like one side is firmly (I'll even say religiously) attached to the premise that if climate change is happening —as they agree it is — then certain forms of government intervention are warranted; the other side in turn thinks such government intervention is never warranted and concludes via modus tollens that climate change must not be happening. Not that I think they're being explicit, even to themselves, about that line of reasoning. But they seem to be choosing what facts to accept based on the desirability of their supposed consequences, and thus being unreasonable. (The implication of those consequences from the facts is itself another form of unreasonability, in that it's inferring an "ought" from an "is", but that's shared by both sides).
If it is given that something is happening, there are always many different things that could be done in response to it.
In the case of global warming, there are the political responses you can't imagine other than; there are technological advances to be investigated that you mention nevertheless; there's always the option of individual people adapting individually to the problem as it begins to affect them (people on low-lying beaches relocating inland as sea levels rise, farmers relocating toward the poles as arable areas change, etc).
Whether the problem exists and what the proper response to it would be if it did should always be kept separate questions, otherwise you get nonsense like we're seeing where agreement on factual matters is determined by agreement on normative ones. But one never directly implies the other. This is basic philosophy at least as old as Hume.
It may be that the question is not religious, but the person in question holds a religious conviction in their chosen answer.
If there is no way to gather evidence to conclusive determine the answer for any reasonable person, then the question is religious, because nobody can do anything but assume an answer on faith.
If there is a way to gather evidence that would conclusively determine the answer for some reasonable people, but then other unreasonable people simply will not change their minds no matter what evidence you show them, then the latter people are religious, but not the question itself.
Yes, but the key words there are "knocking" and "asking". Those are the important steps people want police to have to do. (And getting proper permission to do that first, and showing proof that they got that permission when they do it). I'm sure the people you're thinking of who aren't grievously offended by that behavior would still be offended if the cops could just walk into their house without knocking or asking, even if that walking-in didn't have to involve kicking the door down; say for example the cops had some kind of universal door key. That's what the radar is like. Except, it's like the cops walking in the door with the universal door key are also invisible, so you don't even know they're there. People want to know that the cops are there and that they have gone through due process first, rather than just suddenly having them in their homes.
Because the radar just gives them the results of kicking the door down without them having to lift a boot. It's not the kicking that people want to stop, it's what the kicking is done for: invading the privacy of their homes, without due process or even the decency to show proof that due process has in fact been done before invading. Cops being able to see into your house from the outside whenever they want is just as bad as cops being able to bust into your house whenever they want. Both breech the expected and due privacy of the home.
The only person I've known very well in person who held that "love the sinner, hate the sin" attitude had a relationship with me that sounds similar to yours and your wife's (though not romantic). She was also Catholic, and I am also atheist, and as mentioned before queer myself, and when the topic came up she would politely, almost bashfully mention that "well, I don't really approve of that, but it's your life", and if the topic didn't come up (which it rarely ever did), I could completely forget that she even politely disapproved of anything about me. Her disapproval of my sexuality seemed exactly the same as my disapproval of her religion: "you're free to be wrong if you like, not my business unless you make it my business".