This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “If Tesla automobiles are cheaper to make because of less human labour, why are they so expensive?”
Ah… the CON of capitalism is that the people believe price is a consequence of production costs when nothing could be further from the truth.
The cost of everything you buy is based on what the seller thinks will sell the most products.
Ironically, many people believe the most expensive products are the highest quality, and that misconception drives every vanity purchase.
It’s why capitalists like monopolies in their market. They can fix prices at whatever level they want, and people will gladly pay more for an inferior product. That’s how the health insurance industry works in the U.S. All they have to do is sell the idea that their consumers are getting a superior product at a lower cost because they’re not paying for supporting the poor or the immigrants they hate.
It’s a game of manipulating emotions and dulling logic with massive amounts of cheaply disseminated disinformation.
It is so successful at making billionaires richer that they’re trying to institute it in Canada. A handful of billionaires want to spread this formula worldwide with activist organizations they fund.
It’s why Donald Trump likes tariffs — they make people get used to paying more for their products so that when tariffs are lifted, prices drop by less than the tariffs, so that the products still sell at volumes they did before the tariffs were instituted.
Tariffs are a form of strategic price gouging for a market of Stockholm Syndrome victims.
We saw this strategy in action after the global pandemic lockdowns ended and supply lines returned to normal operations.
A product like the Swastitruck can be utter garbage, but because it’s unique in its design and grossly overpriced, people instinctively believe they are purchasing a superior quality product.
Market pricing is a psychological game that product manufacturers and sellers play with their consumers.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Would people continue to work if everyone received a universal basic income ($2,000 per month) for the rest of their lives?”
The numerous tests that have been performed bear out that they would, but that’s overlooking the problem with this question and its mindset.
The people who ask this question never bother to consider the percentage of the population that never has to work for someone else to sustain a living income.
The average net worth of the top 0.1% worldwide is around $62 million.
No one in this wealth category must work for an income at any point throughout their lives. Having their money in a low-interest-bearing account would be enough to live on the interest alone and without touching their capital.
0.1% of the population is 8 million people.
Eighty million people worldwide comprise the top 1% of the population, with an average net worth equivalent to the lifetime earnings of most reasonably upper-middle-class workers. No one in this entire group of 80 million people must be employed to survive comfortably.
Every time the question of how people will live once they are no longer forced into an (often abusive) employment relationship (in which abusive employment conditions comprise the primary reason people leave their jobs), the implication is that they will turn into lazy do-nothing slugs.
Meanwhile, 80 million people somehow find ways to keep themselves occupied daily without anyone wondering if they’re lazy layabouts. Even if they are, no one seems to care.
All of the tests performed to determine the viability of UBI involve people who would otherwise be compelled to work in soul-crushing roles while being subjected to people on power trips who should never have any power over other people.
No one who asks this question seems to consider how those 80 million people manage to make it through their lives doing absolutely nothing. No one assumes they do nothing because we see the results everywhere. In fact, without that group of 1% elites, we’d never know the upward mobility that has led to the creation of a centibillionaire class.
The reality that the misanthropes presuming people need to be herded like animals throughout their lives is that without having to piss away most of their lives on basic survival, people would invest their time in themselves and become involved in activities that bring meaning to their lives.
Whether that constitutes “work” or not is a matter of semantics. Many people who would not be required to commute to a daily dehumanizing ritual of functioning like a disposable cog would perform functions in society that many others would find valuable.
Some would devote their lives to becoming successful caretakers for their families, friends, and neighbours in need while adding positive value to their community with basic tasks such as performing chores others could not. They may choose not to devote their time to salaried activities because they would find more significant meaning in helping their community address some fundamental needs capitalists don’t care about addressing. After all, there’s no profit in providing mental health services to those in need.
(Meanwhile, we are suffering from a mental health pandemic affecting one in five people. A whopping majority — 70%-80% — of families are dysfunctional. We are a species in desperate need of focusing on our mental health issues.)
People in general would also be much more free to focus on community needs and political dynamics such that when they go to the polls to cast their ballot, they would do so from a perspective of much greater insight into the candidates and the issues than they can currently afford to focus on now while working two jobs to survive at a minimally conscious level.
(How are people supposed to find time to understand the intricacies of nuanced issues if a majority are unclear on how something as simple as how tariffs affect their lives?)
The people who ask this question also seem oblivious to how long and how much effort is required to develop a successful career. Without external resources and funding, creating a successful enterprise takes much more time than it does to create one that’s been heavily capitalized.
Let’s say, for example, you’ve created a special recipe for a unique jam that everyone in your neighbourhood loves. You can get busy and produce perhaps 1000 jars of jam per month, which earns you enough to continue making 1000 jars of product while supporting yourself, and while eventually being able to afford increasing your production slowly over time by being able to expand your operation by reinvesting into it. You can slowly add to equipment and materials and hire assistance on both a production level to increase output volume and a professional level to expand market presence.
Let’s say that your success allows you to create a one-million-dollar per year business after 10 years of effort. If you had the capitalization required to purchase all your equipment, staffing, and professional assistance up front, you could easily achieve that one-million-dollar per year revenue level within half the time.
This is how massive franchises grow from small mom-and-pop operations into national chains within a few years. Capitalization is everything in building a successful enterprise. If one has no capitalization, then time is everything to them. Time is money.
Without the wealth to propel a business into respectable success as defined by a capitalist marketplace, one still has to work hard on one’s dream to achieve it. People are not discouraged from working while collecting enough to live on in a UBI program. The opposite is true. They are free to pursue their dreams and benefit from the sweat of their brow without having to sacrifice their lives feeding a parasite that views them as disposable commodities.
People have a far greater incentive to work for themselves than they ever could working for an abusive employer.
That’s the lesson the one percent teach us about humanity.
Only misanthropic cynics believe human beings become slugs when they’re given enough money to choose not to submit themselves to making other people rich at the cost of their life satisfaction.
People don’t need to be whipped to work. Anyone with experience working with volunteers understands what it means to dedicate time and energy toward causes which matter, and the fact is that not all things which matter involve acquiring vast stores of material wealth.
Life satisfaction is worth far more than money.
The best and only way to achieve life satisfaction is to focus one’s time and energy on doing what they love and applying themselves to produce outcomes they can be proud of. Rarely does that satisfaction get defined by money… and certainly not by those in society whom we recognize as psychologically healthy individuals whom we respect and admire as human beings.
We have learned and continue to realize that those among us who worship wealth acquisition above basic human decency are the most broken and villainous threats to our social stability and progress.
People often blame money as the root of all evil, but that’s not the case; the love of money is above all else.
UBI is the freedom to pursue our higher human aspirations, not an excuse to become lazy.
If having money made people lazy, we would not now have centibillionaires walking among us in a psychotic competition to become the world’s first trillionaire.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What political ideology is socially progressive but still capitalist?”
People are socially progressive or regressive, not ideologies.
Ideologies are wrappers around the contents of similarly aligned people who share a common set of values, beliefs, and ideas for how political processes occur and how commonly beneficial goals are achieved by working together.
Ideologies are not static entities like moulds that immediately shape a person’s thoughts once inducted into an ideological grouping.
Ideologies are dynamic and ever-changing as people change. Here is an example of how much an ideology can change:
(For the “fake news people,” here is a link to the Snopes article giving this platform a rating of “mixture” — 1956 Republican Platform )
Regardless of the accuracy of the above platform, it’s pretty clear by the Project 2025 platform that it has significantly evolved.
People define and shape ideologies, not the other way around.
Today’s Republicans are not Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation championing Republicans. Today’s Democrats are not the Dixie Democrats of less than one hundred years ago.
Liberalism has undergone many varied manifestations as if it were Christianity, endlessly spawning new denominations.
This question, however, flips that script around and becomes something pretending to be an ideology but is, in fact, something much uglier and evil. This question presents an ideology as if it were a costume to wear in a performance following a script dictated to members like a cult.
Ideologies are also not capitalist. People are participants in an economic system referred to as “Capitalism. Each person views aspects of Capitalism that align with or run contrary to their politics. Since economics comprises a core component of political systems, varying interpretations of Capitalism’s’ role in society also form a core component of alignment with an ideological identity.
In short, almost all political ideologies incorporate interpretations of Capitalism within their ideological construct. Hence, you have answers extolling varying ideologies that all claim to be capitalist.
Like religions, however, each pretends to represent the “one true God (of Capitalism).”
If one were willing to stretch the definition of Capitalism beyond its commonly accepted uses, then even Communism could be considered a “capitalist ideology” because capital is essentially a store of value directed toward creating infrastructure for facilitating trade. Communist systems conduct trade within their systems.
After having said that and freaking out some hard-core capitalists, let’s track backwards and identify the typical distinction between Capitalism and “not capitalism.” That definition hinges on ownership of the means of production. In Capitalism, ownership of factories is held by private entities. In a communist economy, factories (production environments) are owned “by the people.”
Ironically, however, an argument often used to extol the benefits of Capitalism is the ability of the people to buy into a capitalist venture through a process called “share ownership.” Functionally, this renders the distinction between Capitalism as we perceive it and Communism as it was conceived as moot.
Communism failed because centralized authority was unable to meet the needs of the people. Capitalism is undergoing a late stage that is rapidly descending into failure for the same reason of consolidated power and centralized authorities.
The only salient differences between the two systems are how power is distributed and who is conferred power by what process that conferring of power occurs.
In summary, we would be far better off focusing on power instead of worrying about ideologies and which one wishes to identify with as their favourite team. We should be far more concerned with who has power in society and how much power they have.
If we genuinely want to live in a free society that we typically call a “democracy,” then we desperately need to adopt an ideology which “worships the flattening of power.” We must adhere to principles in which power is spread like peanut butter to all people.
The only power that truly matters in life is the power to choose how to live it.
Freedom is living one’s life in a state of maximum opportunity and diversity of choice within a shared environment. A critical factor in the success of an ideology is the acknowledgement of how we are all in this together. Only together can we survive into a future that lasts even half as long as the dinosaurs did.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Imagine that millions lose their jobs due to AI. Is there a way for those who have lost their jobs to effectively declare war on AI?”
Well, that’s pointless.
People will not lose their jobs because of AI but because corporations save money on labour costs.
AI is a tool, and the argument that ammosexuals love to barf up applies here: “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”
AI doesn’t kill jobs. Capitalists kill jobs because they can and are incentivized by it within a system that worships personal wealth above all.
We, as citizens, kill jobs through our apathy and through our empowerment of those who prioritize their material benefits at the expense of the many they can exploit.
We bring this upon ourselves by not having a coherent social development roadmap. We allow our societies to grow by chaos rather than responsible systems management strategies.
We empower our leaders through a reactionary process of social development rather than a strategically reasoned and proactive process.
Sadly, authoritarian regimes are far more successful along this vector than democracies because their decision-making is limited to small, centralized powers.
This is part of the reason that the public has been increasingly questioning the value of democracy while looking toward authoritarian models to solve our problems for us.
Sadly, the solution for democracies to be far more effective in mobilizing social development in a coherent and unified direction is entirely contingent upon the quality of the education the public receives.
For instance, the transition to a fully automated society is an inevitability. There is no point in resisting it. We would all be much better off by leaning into it and demanding we adapt our systems to manage the transition better so that we can mitigate collateral damage.
Instead, we are experiencing a chaotic transition led by random powers following personal visions motivated by personal benefit rather than social good.
If our education systems provided a more comprehensive insight into social development, much of the public would be engaged in the political process in strategic rather than reactionary ways.
We would be more unified as a people in identifying trends and developing coherent strategies for successfully managing the challenges we face.
Instead, we are burdened by a dearth of education that reduces a population into cheerleading camps driven by emotionality that can be characterized as juvenile reactions against authorities. Considering how democracy means each person is a governing authority member, this is beyond an asinine apprehension of how one’s government works or how it can be made effective.
Democracy demands engagement, yet our apprehension of engagement is limited to how many likes one gets on one’s post. That’s not even remotely resembling engagement.
That’s like claiming every celebrity walking a red carpet and waving at the throngs is socializing with friends.
Sadly, part of the problem has been deliberately cultivated by the capitalists who want us distracted enough from the sausage-making process to allow them to remake human society into their image.
They have been succeeding remarkably within the U.S. as it has become a dystopian corporatocracy that prioritizes gun sales over the lives of children and billionaire profits over the healthcare needs of citizens.
The public has been so conditioned to prioritize profit at all costs that they will fight to preserve a billionaire’s right to kill people for profit.
We can’t govern ourselves in a democracy if all of our time is focused on survival and profit-churning. Most of us don’t care to be involved in the decision-making process, which would be okay if we could trust our information systems to prioritize informing people over chasing profits.
Instead, we have media that has become a singular, massive entity of public influence predicated upon churning conflict to maintain attention justified by revenue increases.
Instead of informing the public on issues of criticality to the future of the people, we have this kind of incendiary rhetoric from an attention whore indulging in shock stupidity to justify their salary increases by ginning up the rubes to create conflict.
Less than one hundred years ago, this kind of crap would be shut down immediately because it would be considered a precursor to war.
Instead, the attention-seeking mentality justified by the profit (and power-seeking) motive does not care about the casualties created by irresponsible language.
The value of human life has been downgraded, if it ever mattered to society, to a level that’s no greater than the Roman arenas when people were killed for entertainment.
If we don’t start asserting some standards on coherent behaviour that cultivates the best of us as a species, we will continue careening headlong into chaos.
Humans can take only so much abuse before they break. Everyone can break, and people like Watters are playing with fire. There’s no way he will be safe again crossing the border into Canada because of his disgusting language. Some might argue that any aggressive response against him is unjustifiable, and that may be valid, but it doesn’t change how humans behave when aggrieved. I’m confident few Canadians will give him a warm reception for his remarks if he ever crosses the border. At best, at least from my perspective, he’s earned a bloody nose for his garbage.
This kind of bullying rhetoric is toxic to society and is a betrayal of the social contract.
The acceptability of this nonsense and its prevalence is why we have no coherent strategy for managing our transition into a fully automated society. The acceptability of this kind of incendiary distraction from critical information the public needs to make proper decisions to minimize casualties in our transition will create unnecessary casualties. This kind of thinking is what permits bigotry to determine outcomes that dramatically affect lives.
This kind of nonsense is why this question exists in so many forms everywhere and why I’ve already answered this question in several forms by now.
The issues are not complex, but they are made so because we’re not talking about them where we need to be talking about them. We’re allowing jackasses to troll for reactions in “respectable mainstream media” that we would mute and block online if they were individuals and not expensively dressed and cosmetically pampered media personalities.
We are being betrayed by the Fourth Estate each and every day — and to the degree that a majority of the world now believes the U.S. is a tragic case of end times for a nation that has become so corrupt, it can never be trusted for leadership in the world again. However, anyone may parse the 2024 election, and one cannot ignore the role of the media in installing a monster in the top job for the nation.
If you genuinely want to declare war against the loss of jobs, then you need to take it to those who benefit from displacing jobs. You need to start pressuring the billionaires and the corporations they benefit from while ripping off the public through tax avoidance schemes.
Instead of war, you should demand responsible management for an unavoidably dramatic and traumatic societal transition by insisting on the only sane solution to this period in human history, UBI, as a starting point toward sanity in our social development.
The worst thing about where the world is at in this transition is that the next four years are being defined by a parasitic presence seeking to empower further those who are disempowering the working class while replacing workers with automated solutions to toss millions out onto the streets to fend for themselves.
We must stop blaming AI for job losses because it’s just a gun in the hands of mercenaries.
An 11-year-old trying to generate $100 daily is a travesty of epically dysfunctional proportions for society.
That’s a friggin horror show straight out of a Dickens novel.
An 11-year-old should be playing dress-up and letting their imaginations soar, not concocting survival schemes.
As much as I can feel compassion towards whatever circumstances motivate you in this direction, I’m also highly disgusted by them.
This question makes me want to pull out guillotines and give billionaires free haircuts below the neck.
The problem you face is that you have no leverage to make that amount of money daily.
That means you will have to spend every waking moment focused on generating that amount of money by performing services for people who will treat you like dirt. Many won’t even pay you for a day’s work because you cannot force them to pay you.
You will become an embittered sociopath by the time you hit twenty. That will make you able to justify ripping off everyone you encounter as you learn to treat people like marks and evolve as a predator in society.
I don’t know what solutions might be available, but selling lemonade won’t work. Door-to-door sales of products might work, but that exposes you to predators.
I’m not even sure it’s legal for you to earn money in an employment capacity. Laws in your area may be different, and if you’re American, child labour is just around the corner with a Trump presidency.
Even worse is that making yourself available to generate revenue exposes you to the ugliest of predators who would choose to use you as a playtoy for inhumanly sick and twisted people.
Damn, but this question severely bothers me.
You’re a frigging child.
You should have a childhood with friends, playing ball outside in the sun at the park with other kids, not trying to make money.
Please try talking to a counsellor at your school because the way you’re thinking right now means you’re giving up your childhood and almost literally guaranteeing you’ll be chewed up and spit out by your early twenties. You’re nearly guaranteeing you won’t make it to your thirties.
Please talk to someone who cares and can help you because there’s nothing anyone online can do for you — and if anyone offers, you can’t be sure they’re not a wolf sizing you up as a tasty meal.
Within a capitalist system, one sells either one’s body or mind, which is called employment.
The only alternative to that is to pay people to use their minds and their bodies to create products that other people buy to generate revenue for them.
That’s right… either you’re a plutocrat with wealth galore and never have to sell yourself to anyone, or you’re a servant for someone else.
Women selling their bodies in today’s society is a very smart economic move because a great deal of money can be made in a very short time that can propel one from being a seller of their body to being a capitalist paying others to make money for them.
Women selling their bodies in today’s society are very pragmatic and have a clear advantage over men in generating revenue.
If you can earn upwards of six figures for a couple of hours per day of on-camera nudity, the problem isn’t women selling their bodies but your disconnect with the capitalist system you’re living within.
IOW, you may want to shame women for making that choice, but it is a choice because men have made it one. It’s not a bad choice because of women. Women choose to benefit financially in ways no longer available to most working-class people.
Perhaps if we paid school teachers more than hedge fund managers, we’d find people aligning their economic decisions more closely with moral values. In a society that steadily strips away economic choice, you can’t complain about the people who choose options you find uncomfortable. After all, they’re chosen as options because living wages no longer are.
What’s truly sad about all of this is how little people comprehend implications that stretch far past the ones that immediately impact them… and that’s not a phenomenon limited to the little people; the captains of industry we rely on for leadership in society are just as bad at failing to see past their navel… possibly even worse than the majority, although, from my biased perspective, they have a greater responsibility to rise to their status.
“To whom much is given, much is asked of in return.”
Stop crapping on the women getting rich from their birth lottery winning because benefitting from birth lotteries is the world we have created.
If you need to crap on something, crap on that.
The women getting rich by making horny incels happy are not the problem in society.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Could taxing Elon Musk and other people with massive fortunes 80% be the solution to paying down the national debt in the USA?”
The answer is quite simple and beyond evident to anyone with eyes and a mind that’s capable of connecting simple dots from a simple table of numbers:
Here are a few points to address regarding regurgitated soporifics routinely employed by the enablers in the crowd.
Taxing the billionaires won’t be enough money. — Well… DUHHH!!!! That’s not the point. The point is multifold, but let’s cover some leading characteristics. a. Force Multiplier and b. Speed of Money
A healthily functioning economy is highly contingent upon “the speed of money flowing” through the system — like arteries in a human body. The more plaque there is that obstructs the flow, the less healthy the system is and the more prone to systemic collapse it becomes. The low tax rates that we have now and that we had leading up to the Great Depression encourage hoarding and are a leading cause of numerous social issues guaranteed to result in a dramatic economic collapse — mainly as automation speeds up.
The more money the bottom end of the economy has, the more demand for goods and services, and the more businesses grow in a feedback loop. Even more beneficial to the economy is that when more people have more resources to invest in themselves and their futures, more innovation is introduced into a system that feeds on innovation to grow.
These two concepts alone, together, make up for what the useful idiots who defend the hoarding billionaires who lack imagination for humanity’s future beyond building space penises fail to account for. It is bloody disheartening that trickle-down stars can so thoroughly blind people and make them so addicted to the taste of billionaire orifices to understand how their misanthropic stupidity is the equivalent of suicidal ideation for humanity.
The graphic above screams the economic solution in our faces.
The lower the taxes =, the more unimaginative parasites and predators horde = the more sociopathically stupid they become =, and the more of a threat to our future as a species they become.
We create laws to mitigate the impact of excessive behaviours because we understand the destructive effects of unrestrained freedom on society. We know that if laws don’t exist to prohibit murder, many more murders would occur. The laws don’t end murder, but they function as a valve on society to mitigate and minimize the impact of widespread murder on society.
We create laws to restrain an entire host of issues resulting from the toxic extremes of human behaviour. Still, for some reason, the notion of building dynasties to rule humanity isn’t viewed as the threat that it is… even when the numbers add up to our extinction.
The main reason the billionaires should be taxed isn’t even economic, at least not quite directly the most important. The main reason they need to be restrained is that if they are not, they will destroy human civilization, and they don’t care because they have enough to build bunkers to ride out the apocalypse.
The people answering this question who are defending the atrocities of unrestrained wealth are as guilty of crimes against humanity as the MAGAts who are guilty of treason against the United States.
An astute argument was raised in response to this post that I’ve included here:
One point I would make is that taxing income and taxing wealth are two completely different things. Elon Musk may be worth $300 billion but that’s his wealth, not his income. If we start taxing wealth, be prepared to start paying taxes on the increased value of your house every time it appreciates in value. Politicians that tell you they would set a minimum of $100 million before taxing are telling half truths. They may set a limit initially but over time that can change. The original income tax was 0.5% of incomes over $1 million. How’s that working out for everyone ?
That argument sounds much like the fearmongering cynicism against raising the minimum wage — inflation will go up, or robots will replace jobs.
The reality is that property ownership is not the same thing as stock wealth, and there’s a fix for that — eliminate the corporate ownership of residential real estate.
Furthermore, the number of tax brackets that exist today is an unrealistic reflection of the historic levels of wealth disparity. For example, there are only seven tax brackets today. I checked to see how many existed during more realistic tax assessments. It was strange that learning how many tax brackets existed historically took more effort to identify than my bias believes it should.
This link below shows that in 1952, there were 28 tax brackets. Eliminating tax brackets benefits only the wealthiest in the land. The more tax brackets, the more granular the taxation rates and the less discriminatory tax rates are to the lower classes, and the more progressive taxes become — as they have always been intended to be. As it stands, the radical reduction of tax brackets has just been a means of waging a class war against the little people by allowing them to skip responsibilities that are inherently theirs while redistributing tax responsibility downward.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Is it possible that the ability of the Western-style capitalistic system to create great individual wealth will eventually lead to its own eventual destruction?”
I clearly remember my only extended holiday trip out of the country to visit Mexico in the late 1980s — around 1988. It was a fantastic month-long experience I had hoped I would do again within a few years while I was eager to explore the world. I had been living at that point, under the illusion that stability in my income would continue indefinitely while growing year by year as I applied my efforts diligently to what I was doing for employment.
At that point, I worked as an “Educational Counsellor” (according to HR) on the SAIT campus in Calgary, Alberta — a more familiar title for those with experience in post-secondary residence life would be “Residence Life Co-ordinator” — of which I learned many things. In this case, I realized job titles might be universal, but the roles vary dramatically from environment to environment. For the uninitiated, my function was essentially “Community Development,” I wore several hats to succeed in that role while being informed that I had developed — on a green field — the most advanced program in Alberta. I was pretty proud of my accomplishments and still have many good memories from that time.
In my early to mid-twenties, I believed I had developed a firm professional grounding that I could build a successful career for my future. That was less the case than I had hoped because I didn’t follow a defined career prescription and chose to carve out a path unique to my specific interests. There are many reasons for divergence from choosing the road more travelled, but they constitute a divergence from the opening sentence of this answer.
Rather than emulate Grandpa Simpson, I’ll say capitalism isn’t a formula or a universally applicable prescription anyone can follow and achieve great results if they stick to their map. The world I grew up in was filled with people who applied themselves throughout a forty-to-fifty-year stint in a role many hated but stuck with because they had mortgage payments and a family to feed. They could maintain their commitments for so long because the carrot of retirement at the end of their trek meant mortgage-free home ownership.
The first winds of change to that dynamic began to blow around the time I managed to see a small part of the world that was foreign to me. Ronald Reagan was president then, and his betrayals of the working class hadn’t been felt or predicted because the heyday of tax cuts left a lot of cash on the table for people to party it up. It wasn’t until the spend-like-a-drunken-sailor party began winding down that the hangover of austerity began kicking in — then came the dramatic downward slide of uncertain futures.
Lifetime jobs began to disappear as fast as the unions started disappearing.
At any rate, this was all academic to me at a time when I was excited to go on a month-long excursion to an exotic tropical locale that I had been familiar with from books but was eager to experience first-hand. I spent a couple of months in preparation for my trip by learning Spanish as best I could — which was relatively easy for me, having been raised in a Portuguese-speaking household. In several cases, it was more challenging for me to separate the two languages while I spoke. I had to think about my word choices to realize I may have used an unfamiliar Portuguese word when greeted with a quizzical expression.
On the other hand, it was like music to my ears when I heard a Spanish word identical to the Portuguese version of the concept. “Bastante” was such a word that made my heart jump in realization of how much both cultures have in common. The locals seemed to appreciate my efforts at communicating with them in their language and, at times, treated me like one of them. My travelling partner at the time received no such courtesy and was open about expressing her disdain toward this dynamic. For the record, I did try to help her learn the languages alongside me. However, she wasn’t very interested because she felt we would encounter enough English-speaking locals to manage without all that trouble.
Ironically, this was also my first experience with Americans abroad. I learned why many Americans affix Canadian maple leaves to their luggage when travelling abroad. I found it very easy to pick out an American from a crowd in Mexico. This isn’t to say that all were quite so brash and boorish in their entitlement, but every time I witnessed someone behaving in an overtly aggressive manner, it was always an American. To be clear, my point isn’t to trash Americans in general because I’ve known several who are decent people, but we can’t ignore the psychosis plaguing the nation at the moment without lying to ourselves about how much of it has existed for a long time. It had just never been so apparent before the afflicted began donning their colours in a political alignment of hatred as we have now.
At any rate, Mexico was and is a capitalist country, and that’s what this answer to the question intends to address. Of the many things I noted and was in awe of, such as the culture and witnessing with my popped open eyes, and the marvellous artworks of notables like Diego Rivera’s murals, was that the nature of its capitalist culture stood in stark contrast to what I had experienced in the much more subdued Canadian environment.
For example, my younger and naive self was quite shocked to see armed guards outside and inside every bank and shop that sold luxury goods like jewelry. This was in the “Zona Rosa” (Pink Zone) in Mexico City — a multi-block area expressly set up for tourist accommodations. Poverty was rampant, and street vendors, known as “ambulantes,” were everywhere outside the Zona Rosa in Mexico City that we travelled who set up tables at the train stations. (I remember being excited to see the Metro Station area we used as our starting point to our daily destinations a couple of years later in the 1990 movie Total Recall.) Walking around Mexico City in parts was like walking through a gigantic outdoor flea market where one could buy from an assortment of cheap electronics, music CDs, and crafts.
We travelled a lot by bus on excursions outside Mexico City while there for about one week. Each time we boarded a bus or when the bus stopped at locations along our route, three to five vendors wearing strapon trays filled with goods stepped on board to make their rounds and entice people to buy sticks of gum, candy, breath mints, and what have you of small goods they could carry.
(This is a screen grab from a video on a NYC subway that I found while searching for vendors at transit stations in Mexico. The hustle-culture trend from impoverished nations to the south has moved Northward. During my visit to Mexico, this was such a common event that no one responded with the shocked surprise and suspicion seen in this video. There would have been at least two or three other candy vendors on this subway if it had been the Mexico I experienced.)
This was the definition of a “hustle culture” before the term was coined.
Every poor person was a budding entrepreneur.
Mexico was dealing with serious political issues that were mainly responses to the widespread poverty that existed then. I remember hearing news of a Zapatista uprising nearby when we stayed in Oaxaca for a time before arriving at our final destination in Puerto Escondido, a beautiful and secluded beach resort.
At this beach, I experienced my most stark introduction to the world of capitalism through the lens of poverty.
I had been lazily falling asleep under a tree on the beach when I felt something graze the top of my head. I initially swatted away what I thought was an insect, but it continued to flicker on the top of my head. When I opened my eyes to see what was going on, I saw what must have been a barely eighteen-month-old child wearing only diapers and holding a wire coat hanger with handmade bracelets attached to it.
I was pretty confused by the scene as it presented itself to me, and then I saw a woman standing about ten metres behind him with a smile, nodding her head and pointing to the child. That was when I registered that this child was a street vendor in the making and his mother was using him as emotional leverage to make sales.
That’s the image I can’t get out of my mind when I think of capitalism.
Capitalism is a promise made to the desperate to survive that they can succeed if they’re willing to be creative and put in the effort to work at selling either product or themselves to get their material success.
Unfortunately, it’s a promise made by the Lucys of the world to the Charlie Browns of the world that they, too, can kick the football over the goalpost if they concentrate enough and put all their effort into making that magic kick to achieve their dreams.
The desperate to survive have no choice but to play the game while knowing after a while and after having the football yanked away at the last microsecond before each kick attempt that capitalism is a game played at their expense.
There have been too many times in my life when that magic kick was within my reach, and it was yanked away by some greedy sociopath who decided their desires outweighed the needs of the many. Their Lucy attitude was rationalized in the same terms every person who combines psychopathy with manipulation as their vocational strategy for material wealth does; collateral damage is justified as the cost of doing business. If people go bankrupt as a consequence of some decision to benefit personally, then it’s their fault for making a bad choice.
Because we have put no restraints on greed, capitalism will fail, not because capitalism is flawed but because humans are flawed in their social contract-betraying greed. Moreover, humans lack the desire to regulate greed, which has always resulted in the harshest lesson in life, as history has repeatedly informed us and that the Brian Thompsons of this world have been ignoring.
There are many more Luigis among us, and if the perceived solution for the billionaires is to beef up their security, they will also regret not taking the road less travelled… not because anyone wants that. Victims only ever want justice.
“Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution necessary.”
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What is the least amount of authority governments can have in the market to allow functional free-market capitalism?”
Let’s begin answering this question by precisely identifying the role of government in market capitalism.
We, the people, through government, determine the rules by which the “game of capitalism is played.”
The government implements, administers, and referees those rules for “we, the people.”
The authority of government in this and all cases is determined precisely by the demands of “we, the people.”
Whatever authority a government has is authorized and endorsed by “we, the people.”
This is a basic explanation of how a democracy functions and from where its authority is derived.
There is no magic formula for determining how much or little authority a government has within any specific context, be it the marketplace or other social issues. Government authority is a dynamic thing which spans a spectrum of ideologies from right to left and top to bottom.
Generally speaking, “we, the people,” make demands of government, and the government responds to those demands.
Identifying who comprises “we, the people,” is where all our problems with government begin.
In the modern U.S.A., a society with arguably the most wealth and power on the planet has several stakeholders with varying degrees of power and influence on government operations — policies, procedures, laws, authority, and scope for implementing and enforcing their decisions.
This is no different than any other nation on the planet, except for how big the money and power pie is in the U.S.
The human condition is such that a contingent of us are so drawn to money and power that they deliberately influence government in ways that disempower and impoverish the many to secure money and power for themselves.
The largest pie attracts the largest contingent of the greediest among us. This is the cause of suffering for hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens today, which spills out onto the rest of the world because of its undue influence on global dynamics.
In many ways, the best thing for democracy worldwide is for the U.S. to lose most of its power and influence. If it becomes a sinking ship due to the recently elected corruption, the rats will abandon it for brighter prospects worldwide. Today, China is poised to become the greatest beneficiary of America’s power drain. It’s already benefiting from Russia’s hubris and overreach. China has been playing Putin in the same way that Putin has been playing Americans through Trump.
At any rate, to specifically answer this question, the least “amount of authority” the marketplace will have in its refereeing is already the “Lassez Faire” strategy the U.S. has been indulging in for decades. This is why the housing bubble and Great Recession occurred during the Bush Administration.
A complete lack of oversight means the predators in society have a heyday of mining suckers through fraudulent strategies to obtain their goodwill, support, and resources.
If you haven’t noticed yet, you might want to take a trip through Facebook and make note of all the advertisers.
There are at least ten scams for every legitimate advertisement because for a private, for-profit entity like Meta, generating revenue is a much higher priority than protecting their community. Ironically, they are serious about penalizing people for violating community standards.
Governments today have adopted a similar approach toward their administrative functions by outsourcing much of their responsibility to for-profit entities. The U.S. prison system is one such grotesque abomination of immorality practiced by the government through the authority it has been granted to administer national affairs under a for-profit mindset.
The fraudulent argument used to forward this human rights betrayal is an alleged saving to the people. The reality is that such a strategy represents a cost increase to the people with a dramatic reduction in the quality of service. This pattern of rapacious manipulation of government through propaganda fed to the people is most commonly associated with their (lack of) healthcare (health exploitation) system issues.
The goal, of course, in these cases is to appease the few with disproportionate power and influence in society to boost their annual incomes and quality of life at the expense of millions.
Their influence grants the government greater authority in areas that betray the people’s needs while strategically benefiting themselves.
In terms of authority in the marketplace, people are fed the lie that minimal authority is good for the market, while the reality is that it’s suitable only for the predators in the market.
To make matters worse, they succeed in their propaganda by delivering mindless solipsisms that dull critical thinking like a grifter convinces a desperate mark that they will receive a million dollars from a Nigerian prince by simply giving them a thousand dollars.
Like any sports event, a referee requires enough authority to enforce the game’s rules. If the field is big enough, additional referees are put on the field to ensure violations are spotted and dealt with effectively.
Without that oversight and the ability to respond to violations, the game is corrupted to such a degree that it’s no longer worth participating in any capacity.
Without the ability of the referee to exercise independent judgement, they end up favouring one team over all others to ensure they win every time.
In some ways, this is how the market has been corrupted by the notion that referees are unnecessary to ensure every player and every team has a fair shot of doing well in the game.
In some ways, the market has been rigged like a casino where the house always wins, and in this case, the house is the corporatocracy and the billionaires who own the house by proxy.
The less authority a government has independently from the stakeholders rigging the game in their favour, the less effective the market is for the economy. The restrictions on government oversight that are about to be stripped by the incompetence and malice characterizing the incoming administration will lead to widespread systemic collapse. This will be due to the predators among us experiencing a resurgence of freedom to victimize an entire population that will make the nation a new “Wild West of exploitation.”
By stripping consumer protections such as in food and environmental oversight systems, the outcomes are guaranteed to be fatal to an unpredictable number of mass casualties.
The next four years will be a supremely harsh lesson for those who buy into superficial soundbites because they are desperate to believe the Nigerian prince, who seems so concerned about their well-being, will sincerely deliver on their promise to drain the swamp rather than infest it with predators.
This bleeding heart bleeds for all the victims, be it left or right, liberal or conservative — but I will feel nothing but contempt for the self-serving MAGA addiction to hatred responsible for the ensuing chaos and destruction.
The people who fail to take heed of the nightmare ahead will be in for a lifetime of seriously bitter crows to chew on. I won’t be enjoying their humility, though, because I’ll be too busy grieving over the unnecessary casualties they will have imposed upon the nation.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Can a religion be political? If so, which religions are left-wing and which are right-wing?”
People are political — from the self-management perspective by establishing community systems and laws to live by.
Religions are intended to guide people to live with the support they need to find happiness within themselves and through their relationships with others.
Religious zealots and leaders, however, seek to leverage community support to achieve political power. Wings are either moot within the context of religion, or they are leveraged to create further divisions between people while furthering the aims of the corrupt in their quests for power.
The consequences of seeking power ultimately corrupt a community’s politics to destroy community cohesion and create an oppressive environment where neither politics, community development, nor spiritual development are best served.
Religion was the first form of government. The consequences were the Dark Ages, in which humanity lived in a dark state of repression where no progress was made for society for hundreds of years. The world was ruled by the complete corruption of the human spirit made manifest by unrestrained power that we have always struggled with as a species.
We have yet to learn our lessons about restraining power enough to apply them to the mess we’re creating now through capitalism.
It’s become so overwhelmingly attractive a source of power acquisition that it has enticed corruption within religion to grow into a capitalist horror of its own.
The Vatican is among the wealthiest institutions on the planet, and it’s supposed to represent a religious commitment to ending poverty.
Some of the wealthiest people on the planet have grown their seed of corruption by betraying religious principles and leveraging hope against those in despair.
One of the most corrupt of political monsters today pretends at religion to leverage the naive trust of people who have become resentful of a political system that has betrayed them for decades.
Every day on Facebook, I see advertising for “lawyers” who claim they can help people recover the money they lost by trusting a scammer who swindled them.
There is no possible way to recover one’s money from a scammer, especially when their true identity remains a mystery.
The lawyer claiming to be able to help is just another scammer preying on people who were already scammed once and are desperate to trust someone who will help them.
These are among the worst of predatory parasites because they are preying on people who have already lost much.
Meanwhile, Facebook does nothing to protect its “community” because it benefits from the advertising dollars it collects.
What we end up with is an informal cadre of predatory parasites preying on victims on multiple levels throughout society, and to such a degree that it becomes impossible to trust anyone.
Everywhere one looks, every system one turns to hides another predator ready to invite one into their web to drain them dry.
That’s what the whole of society reminds me of today. I’m sure I am not the only one who sees how impossible the situation is that we have allowed ourselves to live within.
I don’t think we can hold out much longer before it all collapses like a house of cards. The problem with that is the most vulnerable among us who have suffered the most will also become the most significant casualties of the ensuing chaos.
People who genuinely wish to hang onto their sanity and maintain something of a resemblance of hope must do what they can to build walls between domains to prevent the corruption of power from perpetually overwhelming our systems and threaten our stability as peaceful and progressive societies.
Religion is not supposed to be political in the sense of a social management system.
Religion is supposed to be about personal growth.
“Render unto Caesar” was a prescient command for its time because the threat it addresses is always beyond evident to those who do not fall under the spell of attraction to power over others.
Some of us are lucky enough to learn that our power over ourselves is the only power that matters.
That is the most fundamental lesson all religions hint at and the only lesson of value they have for humanity, but they’ve lost touch with that.
Ironically, the best teachers of this principle today are characters from fiction.
thotbag 