In the last 5 to 10 years everything seems to suck: product’s and services quality plummeted, everything from homes to cars to food became really expensive, technology stopped to help us to be something designed to f@ck with us and our money, nobody seems to be able to hold a job anymore, everyone is broke. Life seems worse in general.
Why? Did COVID made this happen? How?
Capitalist governments are pro-finance, not pro-people. Totalitarian gvmts (China etc) are pro-system, not pro-people. They’re just different ways of maintaining classes of people who control the power/finances.
There’s always been an uber-rich elite, all the way from the first tribal chieftain or Pharaoh or whatever until now and there’s always been a huge underclass of the rest of us. The first law of any hierarchy is to protect the people at the top.
What we see today (in Westernised countries) is the natural, logical progression of economics driven democracy. Economic theorists say wealthy people create wealth by purposefully distributing it via jobs etc but in reality they do everything possible to minimise the loss of what they see as their money by abusing labour laws, privatising everything, trying to kill unions, creating convoluted laws to protect their fortunes, avoiding taxes and hiking prices up to the point most of us are just about surviving with enough carrot to ignore or pretend we don’t see the stick.
And we’re willing participants in that system. We know this is happening but we’re dazzled by lotteries holding out the chance to join the rich, promises of work making us rich and a media which lionises the elite as some kind of fabulous aspirational status to the point we have people on social media faking a rich lifestyle for internet points.
The uber rich believe they’re better than us and our acquiescence with this system really means we agree with them.
I agree broadly with much of your assessment of history and many of the problems that bely current western society. The rich might be exploiting capitalism to their benefit but a capitalist system with proper regulation will always be better (in terms of Quality of life and freedom) for larger groups of people Than a planned economy.
Possibly but I can’t think of a time that’s been attempted, let alone successfully implemented. Capitalism always (it seems to me) ends up morphing into a system to protect wealth and the wealthy. They would never, ever allow ‘proper regulation’ (by which I assume you mean regulation to protect workers as much as the rich) to happen.
Capitalism isn’t a national thing - its global - there’s always going to be places where what one country forbids another country allows. All a rich person or company has to do is transfer their base of operations there to circumnavigate most laws and pay lip service to the laws of the countries they operate in. Look at Amazon or Starbucks.
Planned economies were the means to the end not the end. Basing it around authoritarian, suppressive, dictatorial government is what made it the end. That said, apart from freedom of speech issues. Capitalism struggles in most aspects to truly be better, even at its best. Because capitalism ends up authoritarian and suppressive as well. Those with all the wealthy and resources don’t tolerate those who are against their theft.
We should be moving past both.
Okay, but what does a system look like that moves past both? How do you ensure people get resources if you don’t want capitalism or a planned economy?
By implementing the thing Marxist-leninists were loathe to implement despite giving a lot of lip service. Actual communism. Not the Engles lenin variety. But the kind Marx spoke on. The thing to remember is that the Soviet Communist party was as communist as the national socialist party of Germany was socialist. Which is to say neither of them were.
This of course all starts with actual large scale engagement. We absolutely need to change the voting system etc as a start. For all the flaws and problems of the founding fathers, the fact that they saw us needing to largely rewrite the Constitution every few decades, let alone every few hundred years was not one of their flaws.
Then we need to uncap the House of Representatives. That’s a century overdue. Followed by abolishing the electoral college. Then reforming the house, Senate, judiciary and even the concept of the presidency. Basically take as many steps as necessary to make things as democratic/granular as possible. Dilute power.
One of the other important things we could do is abolishing the concept of private property. Private property is little more than theft. Allowing the wealthy to horde resources to the detriment of everyone else. If you own a home, you should be living in it. It shouldn’t be some sort of an investment that you never spend time in. Used for speculation on markets etc. Replace private property with something much more sane like the more limited concept of personal property. As in property, a person would actually use themselves. Tying legal fines and fees to a person’s income and wealth along with impartial enforcement is another good start.
Your suggestion would only usher in a different kind of tyranny.
Really? What kind of tyranny would increasing democracy while reducing concentration of power cause? Lol I’d really like to know.
There’s a reason the people who wrote the Constitution decided upon federalism as our form of government. It protects the minority from the tyranny of the majority. This concept is especially important as the urban majority seeks to assert its ignorant tyranny on the rural minority these days.
The United States isn’t a single government like most non-federal nations. There is plenty of democracy in our local and state governments, and we have our bicameral Congress which accounts for both the equality of the states, no matter their populations, as well as the inequality of the states, taking into account their populations. Remove that equality and you will be unable to get enough states to ratify your new constitution.
They did no such thing. Literally that’s propaganda. All they did was enshrine the tyranny of white landed male Gentry. Which don’t get me wrong. Was progressive at the time. Considering no males outside of royalty typically had much power. But don’t push this fantasy that it was about protection from some sort of majority. It was all about enshrining the tyranny of a specific minority.
And like clockwork, the entire history of the United States has been pushing back against the tyranny of that minority. Minority. Women’s suffrage came at pushing back against that minority the rights of non-whites to vote came from pushing back against those groups as well. The rights of gays to marry came from pushing back at those groups as well.
If the majority is something to be feared. And the tyranny of the majority is an actual thing that we have evidence is bad. Then I am sure you could provide examples of this. No examples exist, but surely you must be able to provide some. Where this evil majority inflicted their tyranny upon people.
Which is doubly absurd when we’re talking about diluting power not concentrating power with anyone or any one group. So that no minority or majority has outsized power over any other group to inflict their will. It’s like you’ve never really given this. Any critical or deep thought.
It’d need some pretty strong regulation, but it could work out very well