Market Growth

Is it time for the equality of wealth in America?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “After the rich gets richer and poor gets poorer, it’s telling us that capitalism is failing. Is it time for communism for equality of wealth in America?”

The period between FDR’s New Deal and Ronald Reagan proves that capitalism is an effective system for creating a thriving middle class, maximizing opportunities for upward mobility, and providing a clear path to raising people out of poverty.

That was a period in which the now-myth of the “American Dream” was real and attainable. Everyone can attain a modest life of comfortable dignity, achieve beyond minimal existence, and grow their material success solely through disciplined effort.

What happened was what always happens when public memory is short, and the hardships of previous generations are forgotten.

People forgot what life was like when employment was insecure, rife with abuses, insufficient to survive on, and barely above an enslaved existence. Weekends off did not exist. Overtime pay did not exist. Statutory holidays did not exist. Job security did not exist.

For a brief time of almost one-half of an entire century, a working life was a life of dignity.

Then, we forgot and got complacent.

We grew frustrated with union strikes when they disrupted our otherwise predictable lives.

We saw corruption within unions and began forgetting their origins as a defence mechanism protecting the working class from capitalist corruption.

We began trusting the capitalist class had our best interests at heart and cheered when Ronald Reagan betrayed the once-thriving middle class by launching the beginning of a sustained assault against our only protection against capitalist corruption and abuse.

As a result, the poor are no longer becoming richer but poorer, as we have lost out on the basic dream of home ownership and a piece of the dream we were all promised.

We have lost our ability to succeed on effort alone.

Now, we are searching for solutions to our suffering outside the solution we once had that we let slip through our fingers through apathy and disinterest.

We lost our ability to live lives of dignity in the same way we have allowed a Nazi resurgence — through disengagement, apathy, and indifference.

The rich are becoming richer, and the poor are becoming ever poorer because we have allowed this to happen.

We don’t need to adopt a new system to fix what’s broken.

We don’t need to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

We must fix ourselves first and then reassert the mechanisms of control that prevent corrupt powers from further corrupting a balanced system.

We can learn from other systems, borrow ideas from them and adapt them to our needs, but we don’t need to make radical changes — at least, not radical on the level of tearing everything down and rebuilding from scratch.

We have a solid frame for a still functional society that needs only some essential architectural revisions to restore economic justice and make life prosperous for everyone again.

Perhaps the most important lesson we can extract from this historical period is the importance of restraining power. We cannot live in a stable world that permits individuals to possess more power than nations.

In a world of equals, no human is above another, regardless of one’s skills, talents, or capabilities. We are all one as a community, and we must protect the integrity of the community if we wish to ensure individuals can achieve their potential in life. A balance between community and individuality is crucial to achieving our potential because individuals pave the way for communities to follow. In contrast, communities support and enable individuals to leap safely into the unknowns that lead us all to undiscovered territories and achieve greater heights.

Will Trump’s tariffs bring new jobs?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Is there any way that these new tariffs by Trump will bring any new jobs in the next 5 years or will they just add more inflation and costs to the US families?”

Let’s assume the plan is to increase jobs in the U.S., such as with increasing aluminum production. That would mean Trump would now be in the middle of discussions on that issue, if not initiating plans for increased energy production through hydroelectricity. Plans would be on the table for the development of dams that can serve to replace Canada’s aluminum production.

Why has there been no discussion?

Are there even any sites in the U.S that can compete with Canadian dams?

Why have there been no feasibility studies?

Why has there been no discussion about addressing the increased costs of tariffed products?

Everything about Trump can be described as a knee-jerk response from a bully. He consistently behaves like a childish bully who is used to people capitulating to his demands.

When Canada and the European Union discuss developing their trade relationships, he threatens to escalate his tariffs.

That doesn’t sound very forward-thinking to me. Does that sound like strategic thinking to you?

How does he intend to compensate for the burdens he’s been placing on the working class?

Oh… that’s right, he and Musk have been talking about how an allegedly short restraint would benefit the American people because they’ve become too complacent in their luxuries as their quality of life tanks and life expectancy shrinks.

The harsh reality is that the American people are being played for suckers by the wealthy class for who a bit of belt tightening isn’t a threat to their lives. Belt-tightening for them barely registers as cutting back on options for the new nested doll yacht purchase and cutting back on staff to maintain it on their behalf.

They won’t feel the pain of the inevitable recession he’s causing. Many are likely looking forward to it as an opportunity to invest in business purchases for fire sale prices.

How anyone may parse his decisions, they can’t avoid concluding that he intends to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the working class.

That’s the core goal of Project 2025 and the Dark Enlightenment group as they reduce the nation to a two-class system of rulers and serfs.

He doesn’t care about your jobs.

He already knows his buddy Elon will replace many jobs with intelligent robots. The little people will become even less substantial and be viewed as more of an unwanted burden.

The more he can eliminate from the bottom of the economic hierarchy, the more he can upgrade his toilets from gold to platinum.

How can we have infinite growth on a finite planet?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/How-can-we-have-infinite-growth-on-a-finite-planet/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

It’s not possible.

We have two options for maintaining growth, and one isn’t so much about preserving growth as it is about shifting to new growth areas through a lifecycle management strategy.

The (conceptually) simple model (but prohibitively expensive strategy) for unlimited growth is expanding to an extraterrestrial existence where we can justify an ever-expanding population and theoretical market.

This strategy, however, is not as linear as some may want to make it out to be. Sure, movies filmed on Earth will be consumed by lunar, asteroidal, and Martian colonies, theoretically supporting unlimited growth in those niches. Entirely different markets, however, will need to be created to meet the needs of off-planet living.

Massive resources will have to be shifted toward small markets, making products prohibitively expensive in ways that restrict extraterrestrial expansion.

For example, bone density loss is a dramatic medical issue for an off-planet existence. About one to two percent of bone loss occurs monthly in space, whereas that figure applies to an annual bone density loss for people of advanced age on Earth.

That’s a dramatic biological hurdle to overcome and represents a tiny issue in the vast array of issues humans would have to overcome to sustain off-planet colonies. Making matters more complicated is that colonists face different biological challenges in each environment, from asteroids to lunar to Martian to Venusian cloud colonies.

Adaptation to each environment represents significant investments in biological issues, while the simplest solution is to transition humans from biological to mechanical forms. Convert humans into cyborgs.

Suppose people struggle with tattoos and body modifications today. In that case, one can imagine the sociological implications of leaving our humanity behind to live in a desolate environment without a healing embrace of nature.

So much for option one of unlimited growth.

Option two is riding the wave of technological change and managing technology lifecycles. Unlimited market growth would be achieved by pivoting from end-of-cycle industries to emerging industries that supplant them.

It would be like planning an economy around growing an industry that creates old-style typewriters with an expected lifecycle while anticipating the advent of electronic typewriters with a finite lifecycle that anticipates computers, etc., while hopping from one end-of-cycle industry to another emerging sector.

This is problematic for two reasons, one is that it would be impossible to anticipate computers while still at the stage of an Underwood Typewriter. At that stage, anticipating IBM Selectrics might be possible because that’s a linear progression of technology.

The advent of computers, however, was an unpredictable and utterly disruptive technology.

That’s where we’re at with AI. We have no idea where it will take us, nor how its integration into other technologies like robotics will transform the marketplace.

Unpredictability is also a significant issue in the energy sector because we have many options. Many are in the early stages of implementation with evolutionary hurdles to overcome. Many are in a nascent development stage that shows promise but are still not ready for commercial applications at any scale. We also have high hopes for transformative breakthroughs like fusion energy, for which we don’t know when we will achieve viability.

All this makes planning a perpetually growing economy much like lassoing and riding a tornado like a bucking bronco.

The second and more challenging reason this is problematic is that it doesn’t involve logistics but politics. We can see how that dysfunctionality fails to work in today’s world. The fossil fuel industry is well aware of the environmental damage it does, and how much of a threat it is to biological life on this planet. Yet, no significant energy organizations are spearheading incubation efforts to fund alternative energy initiatives.

They all maximize profits with existing (and predictable) methods while offloading risk to smaller operations they can assess for leveraging a predatory appropriation strategy.

They won’t invest in breakthrough technologies until someone else can achieve market success on their initiative.

Taking this risk put Elon Musk on the global radar of being perceived as a real-life Tony Stark with Tesla Motors.

The reality of today’s world is somewhat predictable on a macro scale in that society is undergoing a massive transformation on fundamental levels.

Dark factories are already springing up where all the production work is automated. On-site work like construction is well on its way to being performed by humanoid and other specialized function robots.

Transportation and delivery industries will also be shedding human labour. Stores and shopping malls may continue existing, but fewer humans will be available for assistance while technological solutions replace humans, even at the cashier level. Shoppers will be able to walk into a store because they’re bored and feel like going for a walk to pick up some coffee and snacks from shelves and walk straight out the door with their products in hand as the store sensors record product information and deduct the cost of the products automatically from one’s account.

All necessary physical services will be performed through automation solutions.

This will radically transform the economy in ways where people will create trade relationships for customized products and services on a more minor scale that focus on developing interpersonal relationships rather than supplying generic consumables.

This will become an era of transformative creativity. People will choose to purchase highly unique rather than mass-produced products for market niches that can be addressed through small-scale production processes.

We will transform from a market economy relying on endless growth into one that balances high-volume generic production and customized artisanal products.

We will have more time to focus on social interaction and community development initiatives (which will positively affect our self-governance efforts). Because survival will no longer depend on a servant relationship with an employer, we will see a more egalitarian society based on a much more valid basis of merit than the subjective favouritism characterizing today’s corrupt autocratic corporate culture.

The notion of infinite growth will naturally recede from priority status to an antiquated model of unsustainable development corroding our social fabric.

Infinite growth will eventually become irrelevant, while sustainability and balance will become priority values.