Part of the problem is that the way we conceptualize money leads us to treat it as if it's a real thing, as opposed to an accounting system the state creates for various purposes, some of which are desirable and some of which are not.
If it can be done, it can be afforded. Only if it is physically impossible can it not be "afforded". That is where we ought to start as a society. Where will we get the money for a universal basic income? There are an infinitude of options--the state literally made the stuff up. The question isn't why there is so little money for so many important things, and so much money wasted--the question is why, despite being ostensibly democratic, we are so bad at statecraft (and have been since the Boomers took charge).
Problem is, not everything that can be done can be afforded (at least, not all at once).
Or, to put it in Thomas Sowell's terms, economics is about the allocation of limited resources that have alternate uses.
You want the government to print a bunch of money? Great. Now we have a bunch of money. We don't have any more actual stuff to buy with the money, though. Are we any better off? No. Is science any better off? Maybe - depends on what we do with the new money. Are the poor and disadvantaged any better off? Maybe - it depends on how much money is created, and how that money is distributed.
Sounds like what you really want is to smooth out who has access to how much stuff, and also support science better. Printing a bunch of money (and distributing it) might do it, but it depends a great deal on the details.
What you're saying isn't wrong, but there are obvious solutions in front of us. We implement a universal basic income (indexed to inflation, so it absorbs any inflation it causes) to keep the minimal living standard high, we increase basic research funding by an order of magnitude or more, and we tax the hell out of the rich. The only reason this isn't happening is because so much of the putative "leadership", in every organ of society, is corrupted by the hyperconsumptive billionaire vampires that these institutions are supposed to regulate (or, better yet, prevent from existing in the first place).
We face, in 2022, a number of problems that are actually pretty easy to solve, but the people in charge won't let us. Well, history tells us exactly what to do when we face that particular problem...
If you are a developer in the US, you are the rich.
Whenever people say “tax the rich” what they invariably mean is tax those that are richer than they are.
If you are arguing from a moral standard, then shouldn’t most Americans be taxed and the actually poor ($2 per day) around the world receive those taxes?
> hyperconsumptive billionaire vampires
Which to the average sample of some outside the USA, the vampire is mostly regarded as the USA, using its economic might to equivalently tax most other countries through many means.
Disclaimer: I’m not against the US, but definitely against some of the effects one of the richest country in the world has on other poorer countries (per capita).
Edit: just noticed this quote: “In 1963, 20 percent of Americans lived in poverty. Today it’s 2.3 percent.” If you are not part of that 2.3%, then you are likely the rich of the world that should be taxed?
> Whenever people say “tax the rich” what they invariably mean is tax those that are richer than they are.
Not at all. It's usually meant as "people who have much more money than they objectively need for survival, owning an estate and having some leisure".
No need to resort to a straw man to win a discussion, please.
> If you are arguing from a moral standard, then shouldn’t most Americans be taxed and the actually poor ($2 per day) around the world receive those taxes?
Good idea, a lot of people would welcome it. Although me personally, I wouldn't want USA to become the hub of the world. History has shown us what extreme centralization leads to.
> Which to the average sample of some outside the USA, the vampire is mostly regarded as the USA, using its economic might to equivalently tax most other countries through many means.
Strange thing to say. Plenty of European billionaires are out there as well. Not to mention Chinese and Russian, and who knows how many from other Asian countries.
> Edit: just noticed this quote: “In 1963, 20 percent of Americans lived in poverty. Today it’s 2.3 percent.” If you are not part of that 2.3%, then you are likely the rich of the world that should be taxed?
The biggest problem with these discussions, every time, is that you don't consider that there are a lot of people out there with huge vested interest to misrepresent these percentages. The naive faith in institutions and democracy at large, while commendable, is a huge detractor from the quality of any politico-economical dialogue.
The observable facts -- if you don't deliberately close your eyes, which many do because it's easier to pretend that when you're well-off then everybody else is -- are that democracy has been co-opted and abused as a term while the world is in fact an oligarchy and a rich people club that invents laws to legitimize their behaviour. And that's been true for centuries. But I know I will not convince you. Your criteria for this is likely "well, I don't see armed men trying to storm my house, hence democracy exists" or something similar and thus our discussion is doomed from the start.
Back to "statistics", if you lived in a former Soviet satellite (like I did) you would see through these published percentages in five seconds. There are PLENTY of techniques to misrepresent information and they don't even have to lie -- that's the beauty of it (example: "What is poverty? Let's lower the minimum resources needed to define it. Boom, we have much less poor people officially now! Lol, good job boys, let's go to Thailand and spend money with funds from the fundraiser we have scheduled there.")
Right. We didn't actually "win" the Cold War. As soon as "communism" (though it was never actually achieved) was perceived as defeated, the capitalists no longer had to justify themselves, which gave them license to tear town the regulations that restrained their worst impulses.
This led to the dismantling of the "middle class", which is and always has been a state creation. Once the capitalists saw the end of an existential threat--the idea that socialism might work [1] due to its ostensible prominence elsewhere in the world--they realized they no longer needed one. So what is now the former middle class was left to twist in the wind.
The US contributed to the destruction of the Soviet Union by forcing it to spend the bulk of its resources on its military. Granted, the Soviet system was suboptimal in a number of ways, but the constant threat of imperialist/capitalist aggression didn't help... war benefits capitalists and arms dealers, but is historically bad for the common people. It didn't help that a number of important figures within the USSR's final years (e.g., Yeltsin) were corrupt (ideologically and personally) and sought to undermine the system from within for their own financial and political gain.
Capitalism's "winning" of the Cold War was one of the biggest humanitarian disasters of our time. It enabled the end of "nice guy" capitalism and the dismantling of the US middle class, but it also created widespread poverty while it stripped hope from the people of the former Soviet Union. (The reason Russia has done so much evil shit over the past 15 years is that hopelessness creates a market for hubristic imperialism of the kind Putin is selling.) It enabled an attempt to reconfigure the global economy into a for-profit police state that has cost millions of lives in the Middle East. The bipolar war-economy world was a pretty awful place, but the unipolar capitalist world is even worse, and the only thing that has kept us from seeing it is inertia--people who still believe in capitalism have already parted ways from the cliff, but haven't looked down yet.
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[1] Although, of course, the failure of the Soviet Union didn't actually prove that socialism can't work. It existed in a state of siege socialism from which it was never able to extricate itself. Given the harsh conditions from which it emerged, as well as the fervency of the far-right (capitalists, fascists) in their will to kill it, the accomplishments of the USSR are considerable. However, it wasn't a great place to live. It remained mostly poor (because of said initial conditions as well as necessary but massive war expenditures) and was authoritarian to a fault; its great sin was that it was a system of economic totalitarianism--the economy literally controlled everything, from where people could live to what they could say--but, then again, so is ours.
> Capitalism's "winning" of the Cold War was one of the biggest humanitarian disasters of our time.
Whoa. You're completely ignoring the fact that USSR's collapse allowed a lot of nations, comprising of easily over a hundred million people, to gain independence. A lot of them, since freed from Moscow's yoke, are thriving in an unprecedented manner. It's basically the opposite of humanitarian disaster for them.
We can't be sure about alternate timelines, but it's a strong possibility that, had the USSR been left in peace, it would have achieved an even greater prosperity by now. The USSR was on a path to moderation: Khrushchev was not Stalin, and Gorbachev was quite moderate (to a fault, some would say, given the results of his tactical mistakes). They might have actually achieved something like communism by now. We'll never know; we didn't let them find out.
I do agree that Russian jingoism was a problem with the Union, especially for "buffer states" (e.g., Poland, Hungary) whose citizens were treated badly in the midcentury. This likely would have moderated over time under socialism. (Under capitalism, for countries still within Russia's reach, it has not.) In fact, even in the SSRs considered "lesser" than Russia, approval for the USSR and the desire to remain were well over 50% even up to the point of dissolution. The people wanted to fix the Soviet Union, not break it.
As for the prosperity in Eastern Europe, that tends to be the case in countries remain mostly socialist, like Czechia. It's true that they have mostly escaped the horrors of the post-Soviet 1990s and 2000s. What is less clear is how stable their well-being is. I hope this forecast is wrong, but I'm afraid that the EU is not that far behind the US on the path to corrosion, corruption, and ruin. What is happening in the US, I'm afraid, is coming for everyone. Where do the worst people in the world--figurative reptilians, literal pedophiles--meet up every winter? Not in the US, but in Davos, Switzerland. This is a global problem.
Are the people of the FSU better off now than they would have been, had the USSR persisted? It's impossible to know for sure, but I think a strong case can be made that it would have developed a limited market economy, one that avoids our issues of extreme inequality but provides the benefits market systems can (e.g., increased consumer choice). Of course, the USSR did have a lot of problems, especially toward its end, though a number of those problems were caused by external forces (capitalist aggression). On that, and on the notion that capitalism's victory might itself be evidence of our economic model's superiority... I have strong doubts. History tells us that geographic and technological forces have more to do with which side wins a war than having the better economic system, and in the case of the Cold War, this was a matchup between a sea empire (capitalism) and a land empire (the USSR). A land empire has to try to assimilate people, which is hard; a sea empire can dominate them from afar (cf. Latin America). The Soviet Union started from behind, both because it had to integrate some very poor geographic regions, and because it bore the brunt of the casualties in World War II. It was never going to catch up, not unless we let it (which we didn't).
Although we can't know for sure what a 2022 Soviet Union would have looked like--Russia itself would probably be far less belligerent--we do have more than 30 years of data on the trajectory of capitalism, once this threat to it was vanquished... and those data are ugly. For at least two decades and arguably three, the reigning economic system has produced nothing but a devolving culture, absurd political polarization, and a collapsing standard of living.
> but I'm afraid that the EU is not that far behind the US on the path to corrosion, corruption, and ruin. What is happening in the US, I'm afraid, is coming for everyone.
If that's how you see the US, then I'm affraid our perceptions of reality just differ too much for us to be able to have a conversation. (My take on the US is that it's one of the strongest and most robust states in the world. Objectively, it's not doing great, but subjectively - the rest of the world is mostly an even greater mess, so the US comes on top).
- People being charged $8K if an ambulance picks them up after an accident;
- One of the highest proportions of the populace with cardiovascular problems and diabetic conditions;
- Incoming real estate bubble pop;
...does not give you a pause and make you think that maybe, just maybe, USA isn't as great as you think it is?
Empires don't fall overnight. The Roman Empire's history -- and the works of fiction based on it, one of which is Asimov's "Foundation" -- demonstrate that once certain positive forces vanish then the collapse becomes imminent BUT it does happen quite slowly, like a tumbling giant. This makes it easy for people to keep pretending that things are going great and everything else are just blips on the news.
(Until one day the courier carrying their package gets robbed and the company shrugs it off and says you won't get a refund. Then it will hit close to home and you'll start believing it, I presume.)
Also sticking to the view that the rest of the countries are worse off than USA is severely mistaken -- but as you said, at this point our perceptions of reality just differ too much indeed.
Don't give the USSR a free pass because it faced 'capitalist aggression'. The USSR invaded Eastern Europe and explicitly annexed half of Poland while in a literal pact with the Nazis. It almost nuked China, and starved millions to death in Ukraine all of its own volition. All of that was in living memory at the time of its collapse - it was a monstrous zombie that deserved to have a stake driven through its heart.
I say that as someone who actually has a pretty balanced perspective on 'capitalist' aggression too which has historically been severe and also with many unforgivable atrocities. But the USSR was big and powerful enough that its hand was not forced in the atrocities that it enacted.
it's a strong possibility that, had the USSR been left in peace, it would have achieved an even greater prosperity by now
Late stage communist countries couldn't manage the manufacturing of toilet paper, there were shortages of everything. There is absolutely no reason to believe they could have achieved any prosperity, much less comparable or greater.
USSR didn't fall apart because of external aggression. It was completely inefficient due to its economic system.
Money is not an accounting system created by the state for various purposes. It’s a solution to certain frictions in a barter economy. It is very real.
> If it can be done, it can be afforded. Only if it is physically impossible can it not be "afforded". That is where we ought to start as a society.
Isn’t this just Marxism? Non-commodity money and all that. I’m not really familiar with his work.
> Money is not an accounting system created by the state for various purposes. It’s a solution to certain frictions in a barter economy.
That's a story that's often told, but it doesn't seem to actually be true. An examination of the historical and anthropological record shows that barter systems only exist in societies that formerly had money, but no longer do (for example, because the empire that was backing the currency collapsed). In societies that never had money, you see a variety of things, mostly formal gift economies, but sometimes things like tracking and cancellation of debts not denominated in a single unit.
If you'd like to learn more about this, read "Debt, the first 5,000 years", by the late anthropologist David Graeber.
If it can be done, it can be afforded. Only if it is physically impossible can it not be "afforded". That is where we ought to start as a society. Where will we get the money for a universal basic income? There are an infinitude of options--the state literally made the stuff up. The question isn't why there is so little money for so many important things, and so much money wasted--the question is why, despite being ostensibly democratic, we are so bad at statecraft (and have been since the Boomers took charge).