There is no such thing as an “ideal form of government” because humans are from “ideal.”
What makes democracy a superior form of government to all others is self-determination.
What makes democracy a far more chaotic form of government than all others is self-determination.
No other form of governance is as capable as a democracy of facilitating the full achievement of human potential because no other form of governance empowers individuality.
No other form of governance is as prone to overt assaults against it, while no other form of governance can survive those assaults.
Human nature demands self-determination, while the assaults against democracy today are born of that demand for self-determination — albeit in horrifically corrupted and myopically self-serving terms.
Think about the perspectives of those displaying an aggrieved assault against democracy. They are commonly born from an autocratic mindset which expects the world to conform to their perspectives. They interpret the evolution of society as a rejection of their insular views and a violation of their rights to those views. It is Frankenstein’s monster of cancerous individuality disguising a toxic desire for sublimation to authoritarian rule by people who imagine freedom as their right to dictate the lives of others.
They are not entirely oblivious to the inherent hypocrisies they champion, or they would otherwise not conduct their protests while disguising their identities or hiding behind masks or fake profiles, managing multiple sock-puppet accounts on social media.
They are the disruptive elements in a democratic society screaming a need for a much more coherent strategy for social development. The challenge at hand, however, is not an authoritarian solution dictated to the masses, as history’s failures have made clear. Today’s dynamic in an information-rich society demands a supportive strategy of education and social welfare programs providing opportunities for healing and growth for a species emerging out of a dark and brutal history while still suffering the effects of generational PTSD.
For democracy to survive its current challenges and begin to approach whatever may be deemed as an “ideal form of governance,” our systems must evolve to prioritize the people over the plutocracy seeking to regress human civilization to a medieval state of rulers and serfs.
We will otherwise find ourselves repeating the bloody histories of our ancestors who sacrificed everything to win the freedoms far too many take for granted today.
In today’s world, the closest examples we have to an “ideal democracy” are embodied within the Nordic models of social democracy.
We would save countless lives if we could take stock of how fundamentally destructive the world’s current adoption of right-wing ideologies is for human society and global stability.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Is the defeat of the democrats an example of what Stephen Fry call the spectacular failure of the left?”
No. It’s a stark warning to the people of how utterly corrupt the corporatocracy is.
Fifty years ago, a menace like Trump would have been laughed off the stage long ago. He would not have made it past the primaries in his first election.
“Grab ’em by the pussy.” would have been the end of his political career precisely because the Fourth Estate took their responsibility to inform the people seriously enough to challenge him on his policies, his character, and his platform.
They gave him a pass on every ugly thing he said and did while demonstrating double standards applied to every candidate he ran against in all three elections he campaigned for.
They complained about Harris’ complete platform and well-thought-out policy initiatives as being too vague while Donald Trump talked about another man’s penis.
They overlooked Project 2025 and let Trump run roughshod over everyone and everything without so much as a peep. A few talking heads indulged in performative outrage at most, but all those people were marginal media entities. No one who was a significant personality challenged Trump’s horrendous behaviour in any substantive way.
This election and every election that Trump participated in is a scathing indictment of the corporate-owned media and a solid argument to break up the media monopoly that’s responsible for massaging the citizenry’s perceptions into a stupor that will set the world on fire.
He’s not fit to be president, but the people who refuse to see are incapable of exercising their judgment with any form of objective clarity because they’re all members of a cult that has been conditioned to perceive this atrocity as a win. They will need to experience the shocking effect of hitting rock bottom, like every addict, before they can awaken to the horror of their blind choices.
Every Republican woman who gets raped will learn to understand hatred on levels far beyond their current imagination.
Every Republican voter who finds themselves facing medical bankruptcy or the loss of a family member due to being denied healthcare will now have reason to regret their choice on a supremely visceral level.
Every single one of these people will become a ticking time bomb.
School shootings will continue and likely escalate.
Violence will escalate, and the media will benefit from it.
People will turn to the government for support, and they’ll find it’s been wholly repopulated with Trump sycophants, and they’ll get the bird they flipped against the “librulz” they’ve been taught to hate so much.
This era will become even more significant to American history than the McCarthy era in terms of a nationwide fervour that tears it apart.
Unfocused rage is likely the most encompassing sound-bite answer to this question.
MAGAts hate struggling in their lives — like everyone does. These days, during our historic levels of income inequality and minimal tax burdens on the wealthy, as they plunder our world into extinction, everyone but the top is struggling.
MAGAts have had their emotions leveraged against them, though, by a steady diet of hatred toward anyone and everyone not responsible for their hardship.
They’ve been taught to hate liberals because the left is a threat to the oligarchs.
They’ve been taught to hate immigrants because they’re an easy target to blame for their misfortunes. It’s a form of manipulated displacement.
They’ve been taught to hate minorities because they have been conditioned to believe minorities, like trans people, are assaulting their way of life simply by existing.
They’ve been taught to hate women because women are easier to victimize when they can be called “baby killers.”
They’re afraid of how quickly the world is changing and feel left behind, and they hate that.
They’re afraid of being unable to keep up and are insecure about their future. Meanwhile, the groups they’ve been taught to hate appear to weather the storm better than they do, and they hate that, too.
They hate a status quo that seems deaf to their pleas, and Trump is a disruptive element in society that echoes their hate. His perceived political outsider status and natural personality of overt indulgence in hatred convince them that he represents their interests.
He validates their hate fantasies and permits them to indulge openly in their hatred while manifesting it in physical reality. They don’t realize how much other people struggle with similar emotions or that they acknowledge how a significant reason why fantasies should remain fantasies is not all fantasies should be acted out because they are too destructive to be made manifest. They are fantasies that should remain fantasies because they function as forms of therapy. Making them real necessitates entirely new levels of treatment.
MAGAts have lived a lie through their belief systems that blur the distinction between fantasy and reality, and that has convinced them to blur distinctions even more, to justify coping with all the pent-up hatred.
They can’t grasp long-term strategies or how distant a consequence can be from an action.
For example, a complaint they expressed was the cost of living, and because their narrow view of the highest authority in the land means that person dictates how everything works, it was easy for them to blame Biden. They didn’t learn to understand how the corporations that feed the media empires with profits would not risk losing those profits by demonizing the price-gouging corporations who butter their bread through advertising revenue.
The Republicans have been leveraging the naivety of their undereducated constituents for decades. States like Kentucky can sink into poverty while their leader overtly grows their wealth and blatantly betrays the entire nation, and they still can’t connect the dots.
All of this is a recipe for wallowing in the kind of hatred that can only escalate dramatically further as the fiscal incompetence of Republicans catches up to them. Their economic mismanagement has now run out of room to blame the Democrats. Trump’s strategy for tariffs and utilizing Elon Musk to be the voice of cutbacks in the trillions while gearing up to make the public accept enduring another round of austerity will begin to crack their support.
His appointments to senior administration roles are already horrifying as an overt pedophile has been appointed Attorney General, his Health and Human Services Secretary is an overt mental health case, and his Secretary of Defense is a television talking head. These three are already a toxic enough recipe for disaster, while the list of notables merely adds orders of magnitude to the levels of concern these already register.
Anything innocuous and unpredictable can become the match that sets the entire edifice of plutocrat manipulation over the last half-century into flames. This administration seems poised to ignite public backlash as Trump pushes an economy-killing tariff agenda and insiders like Elon Musk warn of impending cuts at impossibly surreal levels and public adjusting to another round of austerity.
The MAGAt argument, on its surface level of concern for the cost of living, appears rational. However, its sincerity will be tested in ways that challenge national stability at previously unseen familial levels. The cracks in the social contract will dramatically grow at the level of fundamental building blocks for society.
Once we’ve breached the final veneer of tolerance and the MAGAts realize they’ve been played for fools while hating the wrong people, they will harness all their unfocused rage into a tight focus to enact destruction on orders of magnitude well beyond what they have achieved thus far in society.
Once they reach rock bottom and have their come to Jesus moment, the plutocrats responsible for dividing the people and ripping us all off will have hell to pay.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How did the US fall so far? This isn’t an Anti-Trump question. I really want to know how it became okay to hate someone or even attack them because of who they voted for. At what point did things go so wrong? See comments for further context.”
RE: “I sincerely want to know how it became okay to hate someone or even attack them because of who they voted for.”
If you sincerely want to know, you must go further than this recent election.
This didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen over just one election.
This is an entirely predictable outcome of over 50 years of demonization of the left by the right.
Things have been going wrong for a long time, and they went overboard when the right began treating their “honourable opposition” as enemy combatants.
The demonization has just been getting worse over time, and electing Trump was the final straw.
You must understand that the hatred isn’t about “who they voted for” as much as the values they voted for.
They voted for an evil monster — convicted of 34 felony counts, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American citizens, has caused the wanton destruction of countless lives throughout his entire life, and he gloats about doing that. He laughs at the people who worked for them and has refused to pay them for their work. He’s caused people to go bankrupt because of that, and he cares less about that than about the hamburger he ate last month. He’s an admitted sexual predator — he bragged about it, and he’s been accused of rape. He was a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein, who trafficked in underage sex slaves. He’s a pedophile who has openly lusted after his daughter.
He’s an overt racist who tried to have five innocent men killed to satisfy his murderous lust. The man is so much scum of the Earth that the entire state he called home and has done business in most of his life has run him out of it. He instigated a treasonous coup against the nation when he lost the last election.
People aren’t so much pissed at him but at the state of affairs where millions of people chose his brand of hatred to define the nation they love.
People are dying right now because of their hatred.
Children were hauled away from their families in cages and sold for a profit the last time he was president.
That’s what people hate.
More of that evil is returning, and millions don’t care.
That’s why families are being torn apart.
That’s why people are shutting the door on people who welcome that evil back into an acceptable standard of living for the nation.
School kids have been dying from unhinged freaks with guns on an almost daily basis throughout the nation, and instead of wanting to do something to save lives, those people voted for more of that.
That kind of evil cannot be tolerated without giving up something important about one’s integrity and self-respect.
The U.S. fell because it’s been falling at the behest of the misanthropic plutocrats who regard average citizens as disposable chattels.
The U.S. has been falling for decades, and it got worse, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s demonization of government, betrayal of unions, tossing out mental health patients onto the streets, massive upward wealth transfers to impoverish the working class and sowing distrust between citizens.
Eliminating the protections ensuring the citizens were informed correctly by the Fourth Estate opened the door for a corrupt monster like Rupert Murdoch to steadily drip hatred into uncritical minds who got ever more desperate with rising costs and vanishing incomes to arrive at a state of general insanity.
We are here today because of a visible mental health pandemic affecting one in five citizens.
We are here today, repeating history from 100 years ago to almost the day when the Nazis threatened global domination under their jackbooted heel.
They’re back again, which means everyone who supported a return to an evil regime dominating humanity is an enemy of decent society, whether they are blood relatives or not.
This is the beginning of the next major war the world is facing, and people need to wake TF up because it will only get uglier now and result in chaos until people realize we need each other to survive our challenges as a species.
That means all the people who want to demonize and hate those who are unlike them are enemies of humanity.
That’s why families are fracturing into warring pieces.
They chose hatred, and that just can’t be tolerated any longer because hatred is a fire that will consume everyone and everything we value.
Fifty years of this means they finally got what they wanted.
The concept of truth spans both the objective and the subjective.
“Truth” is “the sun will rise tomorrow.”
“Truth” is also “I am the master of my destiny.”
The former version of truth can be objectively measured and experienced in equal terms of empiricism by all.
The latter is a subjective determination of one’s capacity and is essentially different for everyone.
What this means is that this question requires context for precision and clarity, but it can also be answered by simply saying, “Nothing is the same for all people, not even the colours we see.”
Perception can be considered a form of experiencing “truth,” but no two people share an identical experience of a perception of an event that both will have simultaneously experienced.
Witnesses to an accident, for example, will often recount vastly different descriptions of the event.
This leads us to another answer, “Truth is what we can agree on. The greater the agreement between the greatest number of parties is most likely the closest form of truth we can attain.”
This is also problematic, however, because this entails the evocation of a logical fallacy of populism — or the “Bandwagon Fallacy” — “Ad Populum Fallacy” — and is precisely what we are struggling with in society today with the consequences of having our perceptions deliberately massaged to create an interpretation of a truth which abandons objective clarity and retreats into subjective bias to affect the world.
This is problematic because popularity is a metric for bias, not truth, and it can be highly destructive to society — as we’re about to learn in a very uncompromising fashion.
This leads us to a third answer, “Truth is a combination of an agreement upon perceptions as supported by empirically tested and proven realities.”
In short, the scientific method is the most accurate means for deriving an objective “truth” for our species — because it requires testability and predictability to determine its degree of accuracy in a rendition of reality.
At this point, we arrive at a final answer: “Truth is an accurate depiction of reality which exists independently from people.”
The same “truth” is available to all people, but all people must make the same trek to arrive at an objectively supportable perception of truth — otherwise, their “truth” is a self-serving delusion.
People who ask this question have entirely missed the point.
It’s like asking the con artist who stole all your money if he can lend you a few dollars to feed yourself on a promise that you’re going to pay him back.
The rich are both responsible for the poor and are not responsible for them.
How does this work?
Simple.
The rich do what they do best, and they make as much money as they can so they can become rich.
How do they do that?
They spend all their time and energy scheming ways to extract every penny of value out of every moment in their lives and through every micro-transaction they have that most people think of as just spending time with friends.
Since they have the resources to influence legislation in ways that enrich them, that’s what they do.
Most people would take advantage of any opportunity they can to enrich themselves. Most people don’t have the resources to do that. Most people also don’t obsess about every penny everything costs or how much they can make from any interaction.
Life is transactional for the wealthy, not interpersonal.
The only true friends that some of them have are those they cannot extract wealth from and that are not a threat to their financial well-being. That means most of their interpersonal relationships are shallow and transactional. They experience very little to no emotional vulnerability. That part of them has been shut down.
What that means is they cannot feel anything for the poor. They can’t empathize with poverty on any level. Poor people are an abstraction to them, as inevitable as night and day. They don’t see themselves as responsible for the poor, nor should they because they have their own lives to live, and poverty has existed since the dawn of human civilization.
They were not the first contributors to poverty. Even up until a few decades ago, their wealth-building activities helped people rise out of poverty, and that’s where their imaginations live today.
They cannot conceive of how their successes are now responsible for creating poverty because they view themselves as above reproach. How could they be so wrong if they’re so wealthy?
That’s why people like Elon Musk can become such an overt egotist. It doesn’t matter how utterly disgusting any of his words or actions are because he’s so wealthy; he cannot accept that anything he does is wrong.
The real problem here is that the wealthy are the victims of their success, and that success has manifested in a system that automatically feeds that wealth. Instead of a system which regulates wealth to ensure it is adequately distributed throughout society to continue raising people out of poverty, it’s now become a system of parasitically draining people to the edge of existence. People now cannot survive without additional measures to enable their survivability.
During the heyday of middle-class growth, society spread money more equitably, and the economy grew at its most rapid rate ever. Few people want to believe this, but that was due to taxes.
High taxes on the wealthy were responsible for raising the most people out of poverty and contributed to the most growth of the economy.
Have a look at this tax chart:
Notice how the years circled by a red border comprise the highest level of taxes, the most aggressive economic growth, and the most expansive growth of the middle.
How does this work? It’s simple beyond belief.
High taxes on corporations, in particular, incentivize them to hire more people — voila, an instant job growth formula for the economy. Paying people more is much easier to bear when it means a tax deduction on the other end. High employment rates and fair compensation (also guaranteed by union negotiations) stimulate economic growth. Everyone benefits. People rise out of poverty. More people have more disposable income to buy the stuff that corporations make, which corporations benefit from.
High taxes on the wealthy contribute to fair wealth distribution throughout the system and allow prices to maintain some sanity so that the middle class isn’t deprived of their dream of home ownership.
Since the wealthy, through their corporations, need to keep investing their money to keep it growing, it means they begin encroaching in areas that would otherwise be accessible to the lower classes — and that mostly means real estate and real estate is a finite resource. Suddenly, most rental accommodation is no longer small mom-and-pop entrepreneur but a multi-trillion-dollar entity whose goal is to squeeze profit from every transaction. Living expenses skyrocket as a result.
What was once available for living accommodations on a standard metric of 30% of one’s income is now 70%-80% of people’s income — for just a roof over their heads.
Since real estate is a finite resource and the appetite for wealth acquisition is an immense monster feeding the people employed by this system, they’re constantly looking for new opportunities. In the real estate market, that’s now become mobile home lots and campgrounds.
One used to be able to rent a piece of land from a local owner and plant their mobile home on that lot and pay a small fee to maintain services. Since all the lots are now owned by corporate entities instead, fees have to increase every year at a minimum to keep up with inflation and a little extra profit built-in on top to make their budgets balance. It’s an automatic decision-making system where no one cares to pay attention to the few extra dollars being asked of people, nor do they care that every corporation is doing the same thing so that the few extra dollars asked of by each adds up to lots of extra dollars from consumers whose incomes have remained flat or shrunk throughout the decades.
Voila… an instant formula for making the poor ever more poor.
Now… have another look at that tax table and pay close attention to the tax rates outside the red lines — particularly before the red-lined years begin.
Notice how they coincide with major events like The Great Depression and World War 2.
Then, look closely at the tax rates after the red lines. Notice how we are repeating history.
That’s right. We are repeating history, and it shows in the tax rates.
What’s next is an economic collapse and worldwide conflict that may or may not escalate into an outright global war. We are at a point where global conflict is a certainty. As the American economy collapses due to the radical incompetence of a grifter whose primary motivation is self-aggrandizement, the rest of the world will be busy jockeying for position in an emerging new world order.
The wealthy are okay with this because they stand to benefit from it, just like they have with the boom and bust economies. It means excellent deals for themselves as they pick the bones of the casualties who won’t survive the meltdown. They are not loyal to any nation because the entire globe is their playground. Nationalism is for the sheep they manipulate to do their bidding.
How can Donald Trump truly believe his act of kissing the American flag when his bread is buttered from Russia? In this respect, he’s no different than most who place their loyalties in the hands of those who feed them.
The people he convinced to be loyal to him sincerely believe he will help them improve their lives. If the best they can expect is to destroy the lives of their enemies, at least they’re okay with that. As long as they can laugh at their fellow citizens, whom they’ve been taught to hate, they can accept impoverished conditions for themselves.
That’s when the mask will fall off, and they begin to realize that the impoverished conditions they live in that they’ve accepted also make them the most vulnerable to the destructive efforts of a corrupt leader whose sole purpose for leadership was personal benefit at the expense of a nation.
The real lesson here is that the only way out of poverty is to embrace the notion that we are all in this together.
United, we stand and divided, we fall.
A historic wedge has just been hammered into a cultural divide that’s been slowly growing over the decades as the wealthy have been pitting the little people against each other to distract us from their efforts at ripping us off to increase poverty levels.
Imagine, within a small group of friends, one with the highest income always manages to forget their wallet and sponges off their comrades when they go out to dinner together. Imagine how angry everyone gets, not by their sponging, but by their constant whining about how shitty the service is that they get and how expensive everything is.
Most won’t notice because they value loyalty to their friend and will displace their subjective resentment of their sponging and project it onto the wait staff and restaurant they dine at. Eventually, they get so pissed with the restaurant that they burn it down.
Meanwhile, none of them notice how they’re going to miss that restaurant, nor how they got pissed at it because one of their dining comrades needed a scapegoat to distract them from their sponging.
That’s where America is today.
Tomorrow, without the restaurant, everyone goes hungry while the one comrade who sponged off everyone gets to rely on their hoarded stash because they didn’t spend any of their own money on eating at the restaurant.
It’s not up to the individual rich people to help out individual poor people because that’s like pissing in an ocean. No single rich person can solve poverty. However, all of them working together to restore sanity to a broken system can function like creating a rule for the person who sponges off the rest that mandates they pay their fair share or be denied access to the restaurant.
Expecting a few altruistic wealthy people to make up for the greed of the rest is unfair to them.
Our system has been corrupted to punish those with good intent and reward those with evil intent.
That’s why we’re doomed to repeat history.
People watched Gordon Gecko’s claim, “Greed is Good!” and interpreted that as an inspiration instead of a warning.
Fewer people will indeed be hand-writing tens of thousands of lines of code. However, someone still has to identify use cases for an application, design the application, develop the application, evaluate and tweak the code for the application, test the application, deploy the application, and evaluate the application.
Whoever does that will need to understand code, code architecture, and coding techniques and be able to identify potential exploits within the codebase.
Despite the changes, the role of programmers will remain crucial in the future of coding. Their numbers may even increase. However, they will not be as prone to developing carpal tunnel syndrome or relying on eye-strain remedies as they do now, thanks to the evolving nature of coding.
Coding will become a much more accessible activity, just like creating polished and professional-looking graphics, which are much more accessible today to people without art training.
We will eventually see the end of multi-thousand-employee enterprises and an explosion of small businesses that can match punches with today’s big players.
In another couple of decades, you and half a dozen buddies will get together to operate a business that can serve the globe with a unique product or service that each of you has some expertise in to create a successful enterprise that currently requires employing a few hundred people.
As I’ve pointed out in other answers, this transition period will be excruciating for many people. Lives will be lost, and we can only mitigate the widespread destruction that will eventually be resolved by instituting a universal basic income.
We are already seeing the beginning of a new infrastructure emerging in primitive forms with entrepreneurial solutions such as drop-shipping and outsourced manufacturing to dedicated manufacturers that don’t sell any product they design but rather provide a manufacturing service for designers.
Once it’s completed, the most significant upside of the transition is that we will all have the opportunity to create revenue for ourselves based on our ingenuity. At the same time, all the grunt work that people toil on today while wondering when they can escape their hell will be handled through automation.
People will be ever more reliant on their knowledge and creativity to create success for themselves while being free of toil.
It’s a bloody scary time right now — and primarily because it’s defined by the greed epitomized by eight people owning half of the world, but once we cross that finish line, people will be cheering because we will all finally be free of the treadmill wearing our lives down to dust.
It certainly is scary as hell right now, but if we survive our greed and environmental stupidity, we’ll arrive at the closest we have ever been to a Star Trek utopia.
I highly recommend watching Geordi LaForge or Tom Paris devising engineering solutions or Janeway programming the Holodeck to see how they issue verbal commands and make adjustments.
Watching Tony Stark work on his 3D table is exciting, and it is exciting to imagine what will happen in the real world because we are heading in that direction of usability.
I remember getting a good laugh with a friend when I joked about being in our senior years and reminiscing about how we used to kill ourselves by being on our knees and feeding miles of cable through small tunnels. Now, we’ve got wireless that kicks the old wired solutions’ ass.
Anyone wishing to engage in a dialogue on UBI is invited to participate in an open space on Quora dedicated to the issue. You may need to register for a Quora account — It’s free, and I don’t get any kickbacks from it. This space is intended purely for stimulating discussion on the topic — there are no hidden surprises beyond possibly needing to join Quora if you want to post comments. Visitors to the site can read the content without registration hassles.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why do people opt for get rich schemes when they could just turn a hobby into a business by doing something they actually like doing?”
Hobbies take time to develop into viable businesses.
People often overlook how much time, effort, and resources are required to make a new business break into a new market before it begins turning a profit.
Massive enterprises like the social media giants were roundly criticized in their early years for operating without turning a profit for years before they became viable and self-sustaining entities.
People often fail to comprehend how much of an investment is required, from manpower to infrastructure to market development, to go from concept to generating revenue on a break-even basis.
When people are struggling to make ends meet every month, their choices become limited and long-term endeavours are sacrificed to fill their hungry bellies today.
This is the worst consequence of the historic levels of income inequity we are experiencing today. This is, by far, the worst consequence of the $60 trillion stolen from the working class in the U.S. in the last several decades alone.
We have had our opportunities stripped from us while being thrown into the middle of an ocean and told to dog paddle for our survival while getting thrown plastic-laden chum to feed on until we drown and being mocked for our inability to survive the challenges created for us by the exploitative class.
A person who has time, energy, and resources to capitalize on a hobby they love can succeed based on privileges denied to a majority who struggle with inescapable poverty for life.
This is why we need UBI.
When people are free to pursue what they love, they stop chasing wild geese and become less prone to falling for grifters and making bad decisions out of desperation.
Eliminating the threat of homelessness and destitution frees people up to achieve their potential, but even more so, it’s an insurance against being victimized by one’s desperation that otherwise translates into numerous costs to society, ranging from crime to toxic coping mechanisms and domestic disruptions.
UBI both saves on social costs and grants a massive boost to economic growth through individual motivations, contributing innovative solutions that carry the potential of becoming massive engines of economic growth.
Anyone wishing to engage in a dialogue on UBI is invited to participate in an open space on Quora dedicated to the issue. You may need to register for a Quora account — It’s free, and I don’t get any kickbacks from it. This space is intended purely for stimulating discussion on the topic — there are no hidden surprises beyond possibly needing to join Quora if you want to post comments. Visitors to the site can read the content without registration hassles.
…because they can, and because they’re being rewarded for their success in accruing large sums of money with more money by the puppets they pay to play the role of a government representative of the people.
Why should they care about helping those in need if that fundamentally changes nothing about the existence of those in need?
Why should they cut back on their trips across the globe for their favourite ice cream to ease someone’s suffering for only a few moments while they continue to suffer throughout their lives?
Isn’t it just easier to let the suffering die so that they can be done with their misery once and for all?
The real problem here is the concept of altruism. In an economically just world, altruism would be moot.
We already know that the executive boardroom is populated with the same density of psychopaths as a prison. Yet, we somehow expect they will be charitable enough with their money to sacrifice their luxuries to temporarily ease the pain of those suffering from unmet basic needs.
As individuals, they can only accomplish a little of anything.
As a group, however, we can ensure our system holds them accountable for their fair share of contributions to the world in which they disproportionately benefit from its bounties.
If they were held accountable for how they were at our height of middle-class growth, they would be more successful at helping all in need in proportion to their contributions as a whole because no one would benefit more or less from an act of altruism.
By returning tax rates on the wealthy to an Eisenhower level of progressive taxation, replete with the rules restricting corporations from benefitting from loopholes that permit them to escape a tax burden, we would resolve the needs of those in need on a systemic level.
We would not need to rely on a delusional expectation of the mega-wealthy to voluntarily practice austerity as has often been imposed upon the little people.
Have a close look at what happened to tax rates in the 1920s. That era was called the “Roaring 20s” because it had a booming economy due to the wealthy having much more disposable income. The same thing happened in the 1980s when Reagan dropped tax rates. The economy boomed briefly, and everyone loved Reagan because of it.
In both cases, those boom periods were finite and led, in the first case, to a worldwide war, while in the second case of Reagan’s tax cuts, it led to the “Great Recession.”
That’s what happens when large sums of money are released “out to the wild” for the peasants to get their trickle-down benefits. In the first case, that form of “voodoo economics” was called “Horse and Sparrow” economics because the Sparrow would benefit from all the food the horse hogged and shat out the other end.
That’s what trickle-down has always been. The little people get what the wealthy shit out as waste for them, and we’re supposed to find ways to live in dignity with that disgusting degree of indignity mounted onto our lives while we labour to make the rich wealthy.
It is precisely this dynamic that has been responsible for every social meltdown in history.
Meanwhile, if you look at that tax table, you’ll see the higher taxes resulted in the most tremendous growth ever for the middle class while the most significant number of people were lifted out of poverty.
None of it occurred because we relied on the generosity of greedy people but because we had our system tuned to maximize the benefits of a capitalist system.
“Trickle-down economies” are also called “boom and bust economies” because they go through cycles of recession and growth. The wealthy class loves this dynamic as the little people must suffer through periods of belt-tightening austerity. For the little people, austerity means having to go without essential needs being met, while for the wealthy class, austerity means excellent deals on going out of business sales. This is where they make their most significant cash grabs.
When small businesses thrive in a booming economy, they grow in value and expand while taking on more debt. That debt eventually crushes them when the cycle of a bear economy rears its ugly head. Many are forced to sell or go personally bankrupt and become devastated entirely for life. Many accept giving up the business that they grew out of love for what they were doing and allowed “an Elon Musk” to step in and claim credit for all their years of hard work while benefitting from that work to win humungous profits when the economy turned back into a bull.
It’s a class warfare game they have been playing with us as they corrupt the capitalist economy like it were a casino, and they’re the house that always wins, no matter how lucky any of the little people are.
This is why the guillotines come out whenever the little people figure out how badly rigged the game is against them.
The rich spend lavishly because they can and because they have rigged the game in their favour to specifically allow them to spend our money while programming the gullible among us to run interference for them as they victim-shame their fellow little people and accuse them of all the disgusting behaviours exhibited by the wealthy class, such as accusing the working class of wanting to steal the “hard-earned money of the rich” instead of demanding the money they stole returned to their victims.
Some care about those in need, but about 20% don’t, and they make it impossible to change the system because they invest billions in making it unfair while the rest reap the benefits of their corrupt activities. As a whole, they intentionally aim to strip the little people of our value precisely so they can spend gobs of money feeding their egos.
Due to their unrestrained behaviour, our species is on a trajectory toward extinction. Should we not push back on their greed and restore economic sanity, we won’t be able to continue at this pace, and we’ll be so severely humbled as a species that we may never recover, even if we survive the naive stupidity of our time.
Anyone wishing to engage in a dialogue on UBI is invited to participate in an open space on Quora dedicated to the issue. You may need to register for a Quora account — It’s free, and I don’t get any kickbacks from it. This space is intended purely for stimulating discussion on the topic — there are no hidden surprises beyond possibly needing to join Quora if you want to post comments. Visitors to the site can read the content without registration hassles.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why shouldn’t the factory of money just make money and deposit a fixed amount into everyone’s account around the world to stop poverty and see what’s going to happen on this Earth?”
There is no “factory of money.”
There is a means of adding value to a raw state measured by money.
Even though we have money printing systems, money doesn’t magically appear from nowhere.
Money isn’t a magical piece of paper without any connection to the reality in which it operates.
Money is a token representing effort.
At its most basic level, money is a metric that determines labour volume, quality, and output.
Each person’s labour adds value to society and is supposed to be reflected in the amount of money each person has.
Money as a concept works exceptionally well as a store of value and a medium of value exchange.
What is screwed up in our economies is that we determine the value of each person’s contributions on largely subjective bases.
For example, there is no way that any executive on the planet works one thousand times harder than their front-line staff. It can be argued that the value of an executive’s labour is higher than that of the janitor, but it is also not one thousand times more valuable per hour.
That’s where the disconnect occurs in society and why poverty is not being solved as a problem even though we produce more than we can consume.
The problem we have been suffering from is due to a deliberate strategy for upward wealth redistribution. We have been lied to when told that the billionaires among us are the job creators. We have been lied to when our economies are structured around a “trickle-down” (and parasitic) economy that shuts down economic growth in favour of growing hoards by the few.
The problem, if the economy were a human circulatory system, is that we have allowed massive deposits of plaque to gum up the works, and it’s now threatening the entire body with systemic shutdown.
We need to clear up the plaque buildup and restore our circulatory system to full functionality — and that’s referred to as “speed of money” in economic terms.
The best way to accomplish that is to provide for the basic needs of all members of a society so that each is empowered to negotiate fair treatment in an environment characterized by abusive mistreatment by employers.
We can’t end poverty by printing magic money. If we try that, we ensure a global collapse due to the stable value of money becoming entirely destabilized. Doing that would send the world’s economies into a tailspin.
We need to reverse the effects of the upward wealth redistribution schemes we’ve allowed ourselves to be conned into adopting, as we have proved we learned nothing from history.
We’ve been here before, and our naivety cost us a world war to learn why making the rich richer at the expense of the poor was terrible.
The best way to make the rich richer is to concentrate on helping the poor become rich through their efforts to better themselves and their lives as they are so motivated. The rich will always benefit, but their benefits are long-term and stable if they invest in the people who make them rich instead of scheming to rip off the little people and pit us all against each other.
This is not rocket science. None of this is a mystery. We have had over a century of direct experience creating the economic problems we are dealing with today and solving these problems.
We could take the long-term route of making unions mandatory. We could restore economic equity in a few decades and start seeing the middle class grow again.
Or, we can institute UBI and dramatically change the dynamics of abuse between those with power and those without almost literally overnight. The additional bonus is that we save a lot of money when dealing with social issues by providing a comprehensive social safety net. We become far more successful in enriching the rich because hundreds of millions of people worldwide can pursue their initiatives and supercharge the capitalist economy with unprecedented levels of innovation, adding an immeasurable amount of value to the economy that would wipe out poverty across the globe much faster than re-empowering unions alone could accomplish.
Anyone wishing to engage in a dialogue on UBI is invited to participate in an open space on Quora dedicated to the issue. You may need to register for a Quora account — It’s free, and I don’t get any kickbacks from it. This space is intended purely for stimulating discussion on the topic — there are no hidden surprises beyond possibly needing to join Quora if you want to post comments. Visitors to the site can read the content without registration hassles.
thotbag 