Economic Inequality

Why doesn’t the government give everyone 1 million each to save people from poverty?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-doesn-t-the-government-just-give-everyone-1-million-each-to-save-people-from-poverty/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

That’s an utterly ridiculous idea for many reasons. Probably the best example for showing how utterly absurd this idea is is not the devastating impact it would have on the economy.

The best example of why this idea represents a monolithic level of naivety is what happens when people win lotteries.

Massive lifelong windfalls are often mismanaged because people have no experience managing large sums and overestimate how far that will take them.

It’s much better to adopt the approach the wealthy class adopted with their children.

Providing people with enough to meet their needs until they can manage their affairs intelligently.

If they are responsible and resourceful, they will find they won’t need to rely on their entire inheritance to survive when it becomes available.

We are all part of a system into which we were born and collectively form a social contract by which our cumulative efforts guarantee the health of the whole.

Since we produce more than we consume, society is accountable to all its members to ensure everyone benefits enough to meet their basic needs.

The government should not participate in and create upward wealth redistribution schemes but spread the cumulative wealth to ensure people can survive with dignity.

We are at a point where it is not only feasible but inherently a superior form of economic management than we have in place now.

It will become ever more clear to ever more people as we march headlong in our transition to a fully automated society and entire classes of jobs vanish to be replaced by robots and AI.

Creating a sustainable lifeline gives people the space to be innovative because people are naturally creative problem solvers. Allowing people to determine their life course based on their interests is the quickest and most effective way to motivate them to invent new solutions to innumerable problems we all collectively face daily.

The solution is not a windfall because that is entirely counterproductive and a short-lived benefit with dramatically adverse effects on our economy that would radically increase poverty.

The solution to our economic and social issues is to provide for the basic survival needs determined by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Food, shelter, clothing, security, and the ability to invest in oneself to build a future with dignity for oneself and one’s family.

Most people’s needs are modest and don’t require a radical sum of money to transform their lives without effort magically.

Most people rise to the challenge of building a better life if they can access systems instead of being barred from access because of prohibitive costs.

For example, instead of giving away money to drain into a sinkhole, provide free access to education, and people will take advantage of that to create better opportunities for themselves on their own and without any prodding.

The difference between thinking of supportive solutions and cynical solutions like this question is between a disparagingly misanthropic view of humanity and one’s neighbours and a caring and supportive view of one’s fellow citizens as human beings simply trying to live their best lives.

The sooner we can cure ourselves of this wholly destructive attitude toward each other that we have allowed to fester and grow in society, the sooner we can progress in making this a better world for everyone.

This wholly cynical view of humanity is cultivated mainly within the MAGAt crowd. It is deliberately cultivated by a small percentage of sociopathic billionaires who routinely dehumanize people and pit us all against each other so they can continue stripping us all of our dignity while ripping us off by the tens of trillions of dollars to send us into poverty and destitution while they laugh at our misery.

Why has the UK’s economy grown so slowly under the Tories?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora.

lol… but not lol

It’s sad.

It’s frustrating.

It’s maddening.

It’s a bang your head against the wall to relieve the pain of blind ignorance kind of thing.

It seems that no matter where one travels on this tiny blue pearl adrift in a lightless ocean, one universal constant that science does not accommodate is the obliviousness demonstrated toward a long and less than venerated history of fiscal incompetence by those branding themselves as fiscally competent by virtue of their propensity for preservation.

As the old adage goes, “It takes money to make money,” while the CONs among us lack the spine to explore beyond their survival instincts, which favour hoarding among the favoured class.

It’s always the little people who get stuck with the honourable burden of austerity, never the luxury recliner class. They deserve their effetes, after all, because they are superior to the little people. That’s why they’re considered “royalty,” and by God’s good graces, they have a divine Reich to rule.

They should not be expected to lift heavy fingers to make manifest a reality catering to their sensibilities. That’s what the little people are for.

The little people are the beasts of burden by divine decree, and no one should ever question that wizdumb.

Conservatives are fiscally conservative, and that makes them better money managers than the swarthy class, which demands to be paid for the value they contribute to society and the luxuries of the pampered class.

If the uncouth class manages power, then debts and deficits will be deemed horrendous failures in leadership. If they hold the keys to the halls of power, then debts and deficits are a feature, not a bug.

If the tree-hugging barbarians wish to spread the wealth around to their peers, that’s a grievous violation of overreach for which they must be punished. The trillions in wealth generated by the sweat of hundreds of millions of brows rightfully belongs to their natural rulers.

When they Reichfully sit upon their thrones, then they are empowered by the lard almighty to share it with their peers, and if it so happens that one of them over-indulges, they are permitted to trickle down the excess to the wanton waifs beneath them. They must be careful, however, not to release too much of a flood because that would embarrass their peers by revealing the extent of their gluttonous obscenities.

They cannot afford that sort of smear to their optics because that would incite the little people into another of their tizzies to make heads literally roll.

No one wants any more cake. It’s too disruptive to their digestion.

At any rate, their inability to peer past their navels and acknowledge themselves as members of the same species as the rabble they exploit into early graves makes it impossible for them to notice opportunity when it knocks on their over-filled bladders.

They would rather piss into their chamber pots than allow any of their precious golden treasure to be used to elevate the lot of humanity.

If they did that, they would soon run out of heads to trod upon and lose track of who was a worthy peer by birth or an anomaly by self-made fortune.

If this seems a bit cynical, it’s because it is quite cynical toward a movement that has steadily reversed the course of capitalism to raise a world out of poverty by weaponizing it as a means of establishing power. The economy belongs to everyone while our systems undergo a consolidation of power that has historically been the cause of systemic collapse and widespread chaos.

In the words of economist Dean Baker,

The market is just a tool, and in fact a very useful one. It makes no more sense to lash out against markets than to lash out against the wheel. The reality is that conservatives have been quite actively using the power of the government to shape market outcomes in ways that redistribute income upward. However, conservatives have been clever enough to not own up to their role in this process, pretending all along that everything is just the natural working of the market. And, progressives have been foolish enough to go along with this view.

The economy should serve the social contract, not subjugate it while Conservative politics the world around have never quite accepted the reality that we are, all of us, in this together. A successful and prosperous future requires a mindset that accommodates all needs, not just those one can personally benefit from. The fundamental difference between the conservative “me” mentality versus the liberal “we” mentality is the cause of poor economic performance. It always has been and it always will be because it constitutes myopic and self-serving thinking favouring power to the few, and not the people at large.

Why fascism always appears in economically struggling countries.

Freikorps members flying the flag of the German Empire during the Kapp Putsch, Munich, 1920.

When people suffer from economic struggles, particularly over a prolonged period, they become desperate for someone to step up to the plate and offer solutions they cannot devise for themselves. People become conditioned through desperation for a strong leader to take charge and “lead the way to prosperity.”

Desperation causes people to lose perspective, while critical thinking skills suffer from a need to quell the pain. Anyone who can convincingly present themselves as a saviour will be welcomed with open arms.

Even though the solutions to economic problems may be obvious, they’re also too far out of reach of hope to implement them.

In today’s world, we are dominated by a handful of wealthy people who control all our systems with deaf ears to the cries of the suffering. Most of their focus is on their well-being, fortunes, and plans for their futures and legacies. The rest of us matter only insofar as we can be useful to them.

As our economies have become global and our economic infrastructures have become multinational entities, we have lost our communities.

Only a few decades ago, our communities thrived by our connectedness to each other.

We have lost that, while those who have been the greatest beneficiaries of a global economy have lost their sense of community attachment because the entire globe is their playground.

The plutocrats among us who are most responsible for the economic hardships suffered by millions are entirely due to their wins at the expense of the millions suffering today. Their goal has never been to raise humanity out of poverty, even though that has been the promise of capitalism.

They have their armies of servants at their disposal to secure themselves against resistance and to continue reshaping the world into their image. They are perceived as being too far beyond the reach of laws to allow the little people any sense of hope for justice.

Anyone who can present themselves as a leader capable of alleviating their suffering is welcomed with a total investment of all their hopes and dreams, while a widespread perception of one capable of rising to that need is one from among the untouchable class. That’s why someone like Donald Trump can succeed in assuming control of an entire party through a cult level of worship.

The trouble is that leaders who claim to be their solution also demand their unquestioning loyalty and obedience. That’s the key which opens the door to fascism because the only way for a single leader to wield enough power is to align themselves with the existing status quo of power.

Donald Trump — “Nobody know the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”