You could take 99% of the wealth from the top 12 wealthiest people in the US, and they’d still have over a billion dollars each.
this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2024
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Late Stage Capitalism
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I mean it is true if you’re doing it as a one-time event. This is one of the main critiques against Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance.
Yep, Socialism is necessary.
True. It would need to implemented alongside economic reform.
Trickle-down was an experiment. It was proven to be a failure based on the current wealth inequality. Now we just simply need to redistribute and try something else.
False.
Trickle down was a REBRAND. It used to be called "Horse and Sparrow economics."
The literal idea being that horses get to eat whole grains, and sparrows peck their meals from horseshit.
It’s true that Reagan’s Trickle-Down was a revival of Harding’s Horse & Sparrow, but that doesn’t affect my point.
We’ve proven it doesn’t work. The correct solution is to redistribute and try a different method to check capitalism.
Oh for sure. I wasn't advocating for it!
But it does change the point in your messaging. To call it "an experiment" gives it a quality of transience, whereas establishing the actual history of the methodology allows people to understand the scope and magnitude of how long and deeply the masses have been bamboozled.
That’s fair.
Regardless, Trump’s solution of bringing back Reagan’s first economic plan, Voodoo Economics, will drive inequality even faster than Trickle-Down.
Oh really, would like to learn more.
Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. So to start you may want to read up on Rawls’ theory of Justice as Fairness and how he uses the original position thought experiment (imagining society from behind the veil of ignorance).
Robert Nozick wrote a critique of Rawls’ theory: that it was a “patterned but not historical” principle (that it gives no moral weight to who produces what) and that “liberty upsets patterns.” That is to say, if you start with an equal society where everyone has the same resources you can’t expect it stay that way if everyone is free to exchange those resources with each other. Just like in the game of Monopoly, you’ll see winners and losers after enough time has passed.
This is all to say that the big problem for Rawls is that his theory is a “time slice theory.” It is very strong at describing how a society can be made to be just at a single moment in time but it fails to account for how that state of affairs can be preserved long-term without restricting people’s liberty. One can argue that the game of Monopoly is just according to Rawls’ theory because everyone starts with identical resources at the beginning!
Wow. That's super interesting. I'll have to check out these links. Thank you very much for the detailed reply!
What movie is this template from?
Inception
oh right, should have known!
Inception, a sci-fi/action/suspense movie
OK let's start by redistributing wealth hoarded in churches, prioritized by a product of the number of hectares of land owned by the church and the volume of redistribution propaganda the church has promoted
Wasn't that one is the big shit shows in France, that the church didn't want to give up land? They were forced to eventually
There was a disestablishment during the Revolution that seized land from the Catholic church. Revolutionaries also socialized vital records and institutionalized divorce, which had all previously been under the church's dominion.
Depends. If you mean simple Social Safety Nets or UBI, these are band-aids on a much larger problem, that problem being Capitalism itself. If you mean public ownership of Capital and democratic central planning, ie Socialism, that is necessary and does work.
The problem with only increasing social safety nets is that these nets are eroded over time if you maintain Capitalisy power, and there is still the necessary rise in disparity that comes with late stage Capitalism as markets coalesce into syndicates ripe for central planning (which Marx took as meaning Socialism is the next phase in development of Mode of Production, as Capitalism creates the ideal conditions for Socialism over time).
I keep a "Read Theory, Darn It!" introductory Marxist reading list if anyone wants to read more, or feel free to ask questions.