Since I've been gone....
Much has happened since I've been gone. Not least of all with politics and my views on politics and economics. I was (and in a way remain) libertarian. I first registered as a Libertarian when I moved to Delaware in the late 90's. I think it had a lot to do with my views on liberty and dissatisfaction with the state of the Republican party which was my previous political home. I firmly believed that greed was a more powerful force than almost everything else and pursuing that greed would lead to people, companies and even countries to put aside their petty squabbling and all go along to get along. We'd be able to farm out our basic manufacturing (or undesirable manufacturing) to developing nations. They'd be fat, dumb and happy. Making money would make them comfortable and prosperous and it would usher in a new age of trade and peace. I could not have been more wrong.
As we've seen with Hollywood and Silicon Valley, they are very willing, even eager, to throw American values of liberty and privacy out the window in order to appease the most totalitarian customer with the biggest market. Yes. China. China is on track to complete the work that East Germany started. The Stasi were (in)famous for their total surveiliance of their population. The movie "The Lives Of Others" is a peek into life in East Germany before the wall fell. The Chinese Communist Party saw that and said "hold my beer". You may have heard about the Social Credit System in China. If not, look it up. To call it Orwellian would be a grave understatement. Look again and tell me the progressives in this country don't salivate over the prospect of rolling that out here. Imagine being able to turn "climate deniers" into pariahs. They've already been successful in deplatforming people they don't like from YouTube, Facebook, PayPal, GoFundMe, Patreon and even some banks. If you can't bank in this country you're going to be homeless very quickly. Not only do American companies jettison American values as soon as there's money to be made. American companies *here* drop them when they cannot convince the public to vote the right way and think the right things. They have the full might of Google, Facebook, Twitter and the entirety of the media and they still cannot get the lumpenproles in line. They still like Cheeto Hitler and it kills them.
So I find myself re-assessing my view of globalism, nationalism, economics and more. Much has happened in my personal life to make me re-evaluate literally everything. Much of what I took as certain as the sun in the sky is not as I thought it to be. I had something of a slow motion reckoning of a number of things and I've been changed by it. I'll not go into details as they are personal and some of them are not about about me and would be a violation of trust to do so. Frankly, it's not as important as what I've learned from it.
From a political perspective, things have changed. I've seen that the nominal Republicans were globalists first and foremost. They balked at spending a trillion dollars at home and threw trillions into the rathole of Iraq and for what? Is Afghanistan a functioning state? No. Is Iraq? Not particularly. They have a government and it nominally controls a territory but really the purpose was to establish a serious presence in both places putting Iran in a vise. I'm no fan of government spending but if we have a trillion dollars to throw at a ten year long foreign war, I'll pass on the war and spend it here.
Here's the part where I agree with people on the Left (and people on the Right will probably lose their minds): They're right that this economy is not working for everyone. It has left a significant number of people behind and it is only a hint of what's to come. You have a significant minority of Americans ready to throw away just about everything this country stands for because they're afraid and they're lagging behind. Here's the thing: They're right and I don't blame them.
This economy is now a knowledge economy and that has left a significant number of people behind. In the prior economy, you could be the smartest laborer, machinist, teacher, tradesman or cop and it would help you but you'd still be where you are. You couldn't and make yourself orders of magnitude more valuable. You were limited by both physical ability and technology. Now, the knowledge economy has scaling way way beyond what we've ever seen. People wonder why billionaires were so few and far between and now they're growing at an unprecedented rate. It's simple. Scaling.
In the 1970's we didn't have the technical maturity and the legal framework for individuals to reach global capital markets. Now, we have the financial instruments and the technical ability to move money instantly and invest in literally every opportunity on earth from your home office. Further, the flow of information means that I have insight into markets and opportunities that would have been impossible even 20 years ago. Knowledge workers are now critical to scaling. Unless or until other industries figure out a way to scale, they're going to be left behind. Further, some jobs will never scale. Front line retail has been replaced in significant numbers by online. The coming wave of automation is going to make this current dissatisfaction look tame by comparison. The number one job in most states is truck driver. What happens when all of those men are replaced with self driving trucks? Self driving trucks don't need rest and don't get tickets. They don't need healthcare and they don't need retirement plans. Truck drivers better learn to service those vehicles or figure out how they fit into that model or they'll be left behind. We're ignoring the coming tsunami of automation at our peril.
Republicans long ago abdicated their duty by becoming pro-business not pro-markets. They've allowed cable companies to become monopolies and given them billions to build networks they never built. They've allowed Google to become the most powerful entity ever to exist. I say that with zero hyperbole. They literally control the global conversation. China wisely recognizes the danger they present and has bent Google to their will for the 1.3 billion potential customers they will not risk losing. "Don't be evil" has been jettisoned when it became clear that getting in bed with people who run political concentration camps became good business sense.
If Republicans were wise, they would use this time to bring significant changes to airlines, banks and other industries that are literally designed to screw the middle and lower classes. Currently, banks can charge you a fee for keeping money in a savings account. Worse yet, if you don't touch the money and let it "grow" (I use that word advisedly) they can decide that it's been idle too long and confiscate the money. My son has a savings account and it had about $100 in. They were hitting him with $5 fees every month. Please tell me, on what planet is it ethical to charge 5% fees monthly for the privilege of giving you money that you'll mulitply by 10, lend out and make money and then charge for it? Banks are allowed to clear your checks by largest amount to smallest. This is not for your benefit. They do it so if you exceed your limit, they'll bounce not one large check but 15 small ones at $50 each. They also process debits to your account before credits for the same reason. Does any of this seem ethical to you? Who do you think takes the hardest hits here? The low end of the economy. Why are there so many people not in the banking system? Why do they use cash and check cashing places? Simple. The fees and problems with basic retail banking aren't worth it to them. Better to take a one time hit on payday than risk fee after fee.
There will be bailouts. There always are. If there are to be bailouts, let there be concessions. If I had my way, any bailouts of financial institutions would require retirement of consumer debt starting with the lowest remaining balances on mortgages. Add in that the recipients must be under a certain income level and have a solid history of financial responsibility. Hell, we can go even further. The Religious Right could call for a Jubilee. TL;DR: It's the wholesale elimination of all non-commercial debts. Imagine that one. Imagine the total upending of the political spectrum if someone on the right suggested this. He'd be pilloried and branded a Communists and the progressives wouldn't know what to do. They are psychologically incapable of supporting anyone to the right of Bernie but this would be right in their wheelhouse.
What does all this mean and why am I saying it? Basically, I've reoriented myself on a number of fronts. I still consider myself politically homeless and small "l" libertarian. I remain liberty oriented, distrustful of concentrations of power in any sphere. Be it, politics, finance, knowledge or religion. I'm probably something like a libertarian distributist with a dash of nationalism. I'll probably have another post on Distributism at another time. I think I've re-evaluated things and now I don't think that endless economic growth equates to "progress". I'm sick of consumerism and its emptiness. I've learned during my own struggles about "Things That Matter" (TM) and all this "progress" we're making isn't making us happy and isn't improving out lives in ways it should. Are we more comfortable? Yes. Are we living longer? Yes. These are not really debatable. They're empirically true. Does that mean we're fulfilled? No. Why is there such a hunger for messengers like Jordan Peterson? We're searching for meaning and not finding it in the empty, vacuous culture we have. I think its time we refocus ourselves and our culture on bettering things for all of us and not just economically.
Edited to add: The Wokest of Woke institutions while sitting on a mountain of cash is firing dining hall staff. I predict they will "unfire" them once this gets picked up and the Outrage Brigade gets going. However, the point stands. They will not dip into their tens of billions to help the little guy. Remember that. If that's true of Harvard, you can bet that the rest of the economy is not designed to look out for the low man on the totem pole.
How much more value does Harvard need? Isn't it time we balance social responsibility with marginal increases to stakeholders? We have truly sold our souls for dinarii.
As we've seen with Hollywood and Silicon Valley, they are very willing, even eager, to throw American values of liberty and privacy out the window in order to appease the most totalitarian customer with the biggest market. Yes. China. China is on track to complete the work that East Germany started. The Stasi were (in)famous for their total surveiliance of their population. The movie "The Lives Of Others" is a peek into life in East Germany before the wall fell. The Chinese Communist Party saw that and said "hold my beer". You may have heard about the Social Credit System in China. If not, look it up. To call it Orwellian would be a grave understatement. Look again and tell me the progressives in this country don't salivate over the prospect of rolling that out here. Imagine being able to turn "climate deniers" into pariahs. They've already been successful in deplatforming people they don't like from YouTube, Facebook, PayPal, GoFundMe, Patreon and even some banks. If you can't bank in this country you're going to be homeless very quickly. Not only do American companies jettison American values as soon as there's money to be made. American companies *here* drop them when they cannot convince the public to vote the right way and think the right things. They have the full might of Google, Facebook, Twitter and the entirety of the media and they still cannot get the lumpenproles in line. They still like Cheeto Hitler and it kills them.
So I find myself re-assessing my view of globalism, nationalism, economics and more. Much has happened in my personal life to make me re-evaluate literally everything. Much of what I took as certain as the sun in the sky is not as I thought it to be. I had something of a slow motion reckoning of a number of things and I've been changed by it. I'll not go into details as they are personal and some of them are not about about me and would be a violation of trust to do so. Frankly, it's not as important as what I've learned from it.
From a political perspective, things have changed. I've seen that the nominal Republicans were globalists first and foremost. They balked at spending a trillion dollars at home and threw trillions into the rathole of Iraq and for what? Is Afghanistan a functioning state? No. Is Iraq? Not particularly. They have a government and it nominally controls a territory but really the purpose was to establish a serious presence in both places putting Iran in a vise. I'm no fan of government spending but if we have a trillion dollars to throw at a ten year long foreign war, I'll pass on the war and spend it here.
Here's the part where I agree with people on the Left (and people on the Right will probably lose their minds): They're right that this economy is not working for everyone. It has left a significant number of people behind and it is only a hint of what's to come. You have a significant minority of Americans ready to throw away just about everything this country stands for because they're afraid and they're lagging behind. Here's the thing: They're right and I don't blame them.
This economy is now a knowledge economy and that has left a significant number of people behind. In the prior economy, you could be the smartest laborer, machinist, teacher, tradesman or cop and it would help you but you'd still be where you are. You couldn't and make yourself orders of magnitude more valuable. You were limited by both physical ability and technology. Now, the knowledge economy has scaling way way beyond what we've ever seen. People wonder why billionaires were so few and far between and now they're growing at an unprecedented rate. It's simple. Scaling.
In the 1970's we didn't have the technical maturity and the legal framework for individuals to reach global capital markets. Now, we have the financial instruments and the technical ability to move money instantly and invest in literally every opportunity on earth from your home office. Further, the flow of information means that I have insight into markets and opportunities that would have been impossible even 20 years ago. Knowledge workers are now critical to scaling. Unless or until other industries figure out a way to scale, they're going to be left behind. Further, some jobs will never scale. Front line retail has been replaced in significant numbers by online. The coming wave of automation is going to make this current dissatisfaction look tame by comparison. The number one job in most states is truck driver. What happens when all of those men are replaced with self driving trucks? Self driving trucks don't need rest and don't get tickets. They don't need healthcare and they don't need retirement plans. Truck drivers better learn to service those vehicles or figure out how they fit into that model or they'll be left behind. We're ignoring the coming tsunami of automation at our peril.
Republicans long ago abdicated their duty by becoming pro-business not pro-markets. They've allowed cable companies to become monopolies and given them billions to build networks they never built. They've allowed Google to become the most powerful entity ever to exist. I say that with zero hyperbole. They literally control the global conversation. China wisely recognizes the danger they present and has bent Google to their will for the 1.3 billion potential customers they will not risk losing. "Don't be evil" has been jettisoned when it became clear that getting in bed with people who run political concentration camps became good business sense.
If Republicans were wise, they would use this time to bring significant changes to airlines, banks and other industries that are literally designed to screw the middle and lower classes. Currently, banks can charge you a fee for keeping money in a savings account. Worse yet, if you don't touch the money and let it "grow" (I use that word advisedly) they can decide that it's been idle too long and confiscate the money. My son has a savings account and it had about $100 in. They were hitting him with $5 fees every month. Please tell me, on what planet is it ethical to charge 5% fees monthly for the privilege of giving you money that you'll mulitply by 10, lend out and make money and then charge for it? Banks are allowed to clear your checks by largest amount to smallest. This is not for your benefit. They do it so if you exceed your limit, they'll bounce not one large check but 15 small ones at $50 each. They also process debits to your account before credits for the same reason. Does any of this seem ethical to you? Who do you think takes the hardest hits here? The low end of the economy. Why are there so many people not in the banking system? Why do they use cash and check cashing places? Simple. The fees and problems with basic retail banking aren't worth it to them. Better to take a one time hit on payday than risk fee after fee.
There will be bailouts. There always are. If there are to be bailouts, let there be concessions. If I had my way, any bailouts of financial institutions would require retirement of consumer debt starting with the lowest remaining balances on mortgages. Add in that the recipients must be under a certain income level and have a solid history of financial responsibility. Hell, we can go even further. The Religious Right could call for a Jubilee. TL;DR: It's the wholesale elimination of all non-commercial debts. Imagine that one. Imagine the total upending of the political spectrum if someone on the right suggested this. He'd be pilloried and branded a Communists and the progressives wouldn't know what to do. They are psychologically incapable of supporting anyone to the right of Bernie but this would be right in their wheelhouse.
What does all this mean and why am I saying it? Basically, I've reoriented myself on a number of fronts. I still consider myself politically homeless and small "l" libertarian. I remain liberty oriented, distrustful of concentrations of power in any sphere. Be it, politics, finance, knowledge or religion. I'm probably something like a libertarian distributist with a dash of nationalism. I'll probably have another post on Distributism at another time. I think I've re-evaluated things and now I don't think that endless economic growth equates to "progress". I'm sick of consumerism and its emptiness. I've learned during my own struggles about "Things That Matter" (TM) and all this "progress" we're making isn't making us happy and isn't improving out lives in ways it should. Are we more comfortable? Yes. Are we living longer? Yes. These are not really debatable. They're empirically true. Does that mean we're fulfilled? No. Why is there such a hunger for messengers like Jordan Peterson? We're searching for meaning and not finding it in the empty, vacuous culture we have. I think its time we refocus ourselves and our culture on bettering things for all of us and not just economically.
Edited to add: The Wokest of Woke institutions while sitting on a mountain of cash is firing dining hall staff. I predict they will "unfire" them once this gets picked up and the Outrage Brigade gets going. However, the point stands. They will not dip into their tens of billions to help the little guy. Remember that. If that's true of Harvard, you can bet that the rest of the economy is not designed to look out for the low man on the totem pole.
How much more value does Harvard need? Isn't it time we balance social responsibility with marginal increases to stakeholders? We have truly sold our souls for dinarii.
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