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Elites and the Masses

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  • #16
    Originally posted by Starlight View Post
    This sort of concern is actually a form of anti-elitism. There's a recognition that the elites for centuries have been wealthy landowning old white straight males, and a desire to see more of society than just the elites represented and having a roll in government. Thus the desire from Democrats to make sure that non-white, non-males, non-straights etc also have representation in congress and the presidency.
    No disagreement on your definition of elites through history. My concern is the Democrats seem to be emphasizing the identity of the person and not the competence of the person. They seem to think if we get women and minorities into office, a miracle is going to occur and everything will be fine. I'm sorry but I've seen too many women at work and too many minorities in my city government screw up to believe that they are magically endowed with powers to fix everything. And since I've seen enough white males screw up too, that why I put my emphasis on competency.
    "For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings." Hosea 6:6

    "Theology can be an intellectual entertainment." Metropolitan Anthony Bloom

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    • #17
      Originally posted by Starlight View Post
      Another thing that I, as a political observer, would say would help de-corrupt US politics, is an increase in the number of political parties. In order to do this you need to change the voting system from plurality voting to instant run-off voting. This can be done by individual states, as they have control over how federal congressional elections happen in their state. Maine has already changed to instant run-off, but other bigger states need to do so also. In my lifetime in my own country we've used both those systems, and the second one has far, far better outcomes and leads to more parties and better people being elected. You'll be shocked at how much it improves your political system.
      Not the trend in my state. The Democratic state government has just made it harder for political parties to appear on the ballot.
      "For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings." Hosea 6:6

      "Theology can be an intellectual entertainment." Metropolitan Anthony Bloom

      Comment


      • #18
        Thought this might be a good place to post this:

        I'm always still in trouble again

        "You're by far the worst poster on TWeb" and "TWeb's biggest liar" --starlight (the guy who says Stalin was a right-winger)
        "Overall I would rate the withdrawal from Afghanistan as by far the best thing Biden's done" --Starlight
        "Of course, human life begins at fertilization that’s not the argument." --Tassman

        Comment


        • #19
          Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
          Bloomberg didn't even make the list.

          Comment


          • #20
            Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
            Thought this might be a good place to post this:
            Does it make you realize that the capitalist system you've been promoting leads to this sort of horrific inequality as the capitalists across billions, and make you a convert to socialism?
            "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
            "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
            "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

            Comment


            • #21
              Originally posted by Thoughtful Monk View Post
              that why I put my emphasis on competency.
              Competency can be quite 'elitist'. The people who went to the best schools and got the best education etc, can be perceived as elites by the public. Mossrose mocks me in this forum for being an elitist snob because I'm highly-educated. I usually perceive that as her mocking the idea of competency - I'm not wealthy-born or famous or a member of the elite in any other sense.

              Of course, elites can also get their positions by virtue of having competent relatives. I'm thinking here particularly of 'fail-sons' as they are sometimes called, where a competent person earns wealth through effort but then their son grows up with a silver spoon in his mouth and never has to work for anything and turns out to be an incompetent layabout buffoon. Yet that fail-son will get given an endless amount of favours and money and positions by his father and others in the elite circles throughout his life just because of whose son he is. People point to that in cases like Hunter Biden and Donald Trump.

              Originally posted by Thoughtful Monk
              Another thing that I, as a political observer, would say would help de-corrupt US politics, is an increase in the number of political parties. In order to do this you need to change the voting system from plurality voting to instant run-off voting.
              Not the trend in my state. The Democratic state government has just made it harder for political parties to appear on the ballot.
              I don't think it really makes a difference how easy/hard it is for parties to appear on the ballot under the current system because the current system by its nature inevitably leads to one of the two big parties winning. That is why changing the system away from plurality voting to instant-run-off voting is so fundamental.

              In my country when we changed our voting system 25 years ago away from plurality voting, we went from only 2 parties ever having representation, to 7 parties having representation in the next election. After the latest election here 3 days ago, we've dropped to 5 parties having representation, and for the first time one of those parties has over 50% of the seats and can govern alone without having to work cooperatively with any other party to form a government, and political commentators are discussing how small a number of parties that is, and whether such a small number is bad for our democracy. The consensus seems to be that these things move in natural cycles and it's likely to cycle back up against to the 7-8 party range within a couple of elections.

              So I see the fundamental change needed in the US to be a change away from plurality voting. Other changes are pretty pointless by comparison. The plurality voting system is something that can be changed at the state level. Maine did it recently.
              "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
              "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
              "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

              Comment


              • #22
                Originally posted by Thoughtful Monk View Post
                FDR was president from 1933 to 1944. From '33 to '40, income inequality bounces around 45% and then starts dropping off. From this chart, appears the New Deal did little to change that.
                FDR did a lot of different things over his time in office and the New Deal came in several pieces. Perhaps he tinkered for a time with the policies, eventually got the combination lock to the economy right, and the result was that sudden massive drop.

                Why the drop starting in '40? Obviously WWII begins and the US ramps up manufacturing to support the allied war effort. Since we needed many, many people working it's no wonder that more income went to them and inequality drops.
                I agree WWII was a big factor. A huge combination of things happened in WWII. Others wars, however, don't have this level of impact in charts like this. So something was unusual about FDR / WWII. Some things I can point to, which might be factors or might not... The US government took over industry in a pretty unprecedented and communistic way to direct production for the war effort. The government also borrowed massive amounts of money to spend in the economy. It also employed ~100% of the available workforce giving them jobs as soldiers or in industry. In sum there was monumental government intervention in the economy in a way possibly unparalleled in US history.

                Why does the line stay low starting in '45? Simple: the US was the only functioning economy in the world. Europe and Japan are smoking ruins.
                Your explanation here is too-focused on this specific US graph. The graphs for the European countries that were in the war look like this graph also...



                The only difference between the US and those European countries is that in Germany and France the drop in income for the elites relative to the rest of the populace has been largely preserved through to the present day. The UK though follows the US pattern of the 1980s and 1990s undoing the achievement of the 1940s, and the income returning to the elites at the expense of the working people. So what did the UK and the US have in common with respect to economic policy over the 80s/90s that France and Germany didn't share? The obvious answer is the deregulation programs of Reaganomics / Thatcherism. Both the US and UK embarked on very emphatic decade-long programs to change how their economies worked in favour of less government intervention and less taxes on the wealthy. Germany and France didn't.

                We again had to work to support the world. Frankly I think this easily explains the line into through the 50's and into the 60's and 70's.
                As I say, this explanation doesn't fit with the data from other countries. Even Australia's line looks the same.

                So why did the line start going up? The US stopped being a manufacturing powerhouse. Manufacturing was an industry someone with a high school education could do well at. When we started entering into free trade deals and our manufacturing jobs went to China, India, Mexico, etc., that's when inequality starts coming in.
                The first big free trade agreement was NAFTA which was 1988, and the US line is already well on its way up by then. The vast majority of US free trade deals were done in the early 2000s under Bush, and yes, that seems to correlate with a massive loss in manufacturing jobs at that point in time, but that's two decades too late to explain the data in this graph. I'm not saying trade deals aren't bad, just that they don't seem to be the cause of the end of the era of relative equality the US experienced in the 1945-1985 range.

                So this graph is not a reflection of progressive US policy. It's a reflection of US economic dominance of the world economy and when that went away, income inequality went up.
                Again, a US-centric explanation doesn't stack up well with why other countries saw these same trends. They can't all have been singly dominating the world economy.
                "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
                "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
                "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

                Comment


                • #23
                  Originally posted by Starlight View Post
                  Does it make you realize that the capitalist system you've been promoting leads to this sort of horrific inequality as the capitalists across accrue billions, and make you a convert to socialism?
                  Didn't spot the typo within the edit time window.

                  "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
                  "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
                  "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

                  Comment


                  • #24
                    Originally posted by Starlight View Post
                    Does it make you realize that the capitalist system you've been promoting leads to this sort of horrific inequality as the capitalists across billions, and make you a convert to socialism?
                    Look at countries where Socialism was fully employed and you'll see the system with the greatest disparity of wealth.

                    I'm always still in trouble again

                    "You're by far the worst poster on TWeb" and "TWeb's biggest liar" --starlight (the guy who says Stalin was a right-winger)
                    "Overall I would rate the withdrawal from Afghanistan as by far the best thing Biden's done" --Starlight
                    "Of course, human life begins at fertilization that’s not the argument." --Tassman

                    Comment


                    • #25
                      Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
                      Look at countries where Socialism was fully employed and you'll see the system with the greatest disparity of wealth.
                      The countries with the least income inequality are the Western countries that have most incorporated socialistic principles into their economies, such as the Scandinavian countries. There seems to be a fairly clear pattern across the Western countries, that the more they have socialistic principles they have put into their capitalist economies, the less income inequality that results.

                      So if you don't like those billionaires making all that money during the pandemic, if you don't like the country being run by elites, it's fairly clear from the example of the Scandinavian countries what sorts of things need to be done to prevent that.
                      "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
                      "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
                      "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

                      Comment


                      • #26
                        Originally posted by Starlight View Post
                        The countries with the least income inequality are the Western countries that have most incorporated socialistic principles into their economies, such as the Scandinavian countries. There seems to be a fairly clear pattern across the Western countries, that the more they have socialistic principles they have put into their capitalist economies, the less income inequality that results.

                        So if you don't like those billionaires making all that money during the pandemic, if you don't like the country being run by elites, it's fairly clear from the example of the Scandinavian countries what sorts of things need to be done to prevent that.
                        Eastern Europe might want to talk to you about their experience. So would Venezuela and several other countries (and note that Venezuela was one of the richest countries in the world in the middle of the 20th century and the richest South American country until the Socialists sized power and turned it into a basket case).

                        I'm always still in trouble again

                        "You're by far the worst poster on TWeb" and "TWeb's biggest liar" --starlight (the guy who says Stalin was a right-winger)
                        "Overall I would rate the withdrawal from Afghanistan as by far the best thing Biden's done" --Starlight
                        "Of course, human life begins at fertilization that’s not the argument." --Tassman

                        Comment


                        • #27
                          Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
                          Eastern Europe might want to talk to you about their experience. So would Venezuela and several other countries (and note that Venezuela was one of the richest countries in the world in the middle of the 20th century and the richest South American country until the Socialists sized power and turned it into a basket case).
                          I'm more interested in looking at what works well and what doesn't in Western countries, because we live in Western countries.

                          Trying to compare apples with oranges gets very difficult. The examples you mention are too different to be interesting as there are too many uncontrolled variables.
                          "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
                          "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
                          "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

                          Comment


                          • #28
                            Originally posted by Starlight View Post
                            I'm more interested in looking at what works well and what doesn't in Western countries, because we live in Western countries.

                            Trying to compare apples with oranges gets very difficult. The examples you mention are too different to be interesting as there are too many uncontrolled variables.
                            I'll let my friends from Poland and Germany (she was raised in East Germany) know that you have proclaimed that they aren't western.

                            And how convenient of you to turn a blind eye on the one experiment in socialism in action taking place right before us. As I said, Venezuela was one of the richest countries in the world in the middle of the last century and was the wealthiest nation in South America right before your fellow travelers seized power and turned it into the dumpster fire we see before us.

                            I'm always still in trouble again

                            "You're by far the worst poster on TWeb" and "TWeb's biggest liar" --starlight (the guy who says Stalin was a right-winger)
                            "Overall I would rate the withdrawal from Afghanistan as by far the best thing Biden's done" --Starlight
                            "Of course, human life begins at fertilization that’s not the argument." --Tassman

                            Comment


                            • #29
                              Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
                              I'll let my friends from Poland and Germany (she was raised in East Germany) know that you have proclaimed that they aren't western.
                              Do you not understand geography and the geographical difference between 'east' and 'west' in Europe? Are you also ignorant of history and the different history of the Eastern European countries as compared to the Western ones?

                              And how convenient of you to turn a blind eye on the one experiment in socialism in action taking place right before us.
                              Bolivia? The Socialist government there has been hugely successful, their GDP has been going through the roof, and thousands have been lifted out of poverty. Despite a recent US attempt to overthrow their democracy there, the socialist party was just reelected this week in a landslide.

                              As I said, Venezuela was one of the richest countries in the world in the middle of the last century and was the wealthiest nation in South America right before your fellow travelers seized power and turned it into the dumpster fire we see before us.
                              It's not a very interesting example, as for over 100 years now it's economy has been pretty solely depending on exporting oil. In most other respects they have been utterly reliant on imports, even for things like food.

                              So when the price of oil was high, they could be among the richest nations in the world. And when the price of oil plummets, they are paupers. And when other nations decide to trade embargo their oil and their food, they become a disaster zone.

                              Compared to those factors, the internal government of Venezuela doesn't appear to be an important factor. This is why it is important not to compare apples and oranges.
                              "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
                              "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
                              "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

                              Comment

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