This has been happening non stop since the 70s and the current state of America shows the results of 50 years of breakneck capitalism
What you’re seeing is that at this point it’s so entrenched that people can look at it and shrug instead of being horrified that instead of being a rare situation it’s “Business as usual”
Breakneck capitalism, so to speak is why I can get almost any material , consumer or professional, delivered to my door in a few days - including things that would be considered exotic a year ago, at a tenth the price they would have been (even adjusting for col).
Corporate raiding is nothing new, and financialization does let it happen at a pace that it couldn't previously - but just saying "but that's capitalism!" is quitting
Worker owned collectives have the same problems, people want to acquire power and then use it to be ahead when strategies fail and someone has to take responsibility.
How do you prevent that looks different in a market economy than a planned one (planned ones having more widespread but also more small scale corruption issues like these) - but you still do need to do the work to prevent it.
One of the larger issues that is causing problems is the misnomer of "maximizing shareholder value" which took hold in the late-1970s and especially the 1980s (unsurprisingly the same era as Reagan).
I for one can’t get all the things I want in a few days: I want ethically sourced clothing, or milk from local cows gently pasteurized. Sometimes I want a particular kind of cheese from a farmers market and they’re sold out that day.
When you start looking for quality material produced in a way that minimizes human suffering, no, capitalism doesn’t make this available to me in a few days or for cheaper.
People were given the choice between having lots of things made with shortcuts or having a few things but made the right way.
People, completely as expected, chose lots of things made with shortcuts.
A gallon of locally sourced, ethically made milk is awesome. But so is a gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs, and a pack of cheese slices for the same cost.
Because the externalities are completely hidden from them, and because their own situations are precarious enough that they have no real choice but to choose the cheapest options.
Make it clear at the point of purchase all the negative tradeoffs made to enable that Low, Low Price, and some significant percentage of people will choose to buy things that cost more.
Make sure that everyone—yes, everyone, no exceptions—has a decent amount of disposable income on a reliable basis, and that percentage will grow a lot more.
No it will not. Larger incomes are only larger because of industrial machinery, the same process that makes it more expensive to buy "organic' is what drives income up.
Software engineering is so well paid due to these dynamics.
All of those came from public investment in infrastructure, funded by taxing the shit out of robber barons and trust busting at a never before seen scale starting in the 1930s and going until we went to Vietnam.
It’s like capitalists completely forgot about the massively successful Great Society program (which is the only thing holding this all together still) that literally created from whole cloth most of the roads, sewers, electricity, social security, elderly healthcare, consumer protections, etc… that we all rely on everyday.
So no. That’s totally wrong, the world you live in much worse than it could have been for MOST people had generations of psychopaths not divested the public benefit aspect of organizing
It's nice that you can get things. But there's a cost - increasingly large numbers of people can't.
I'm sure as the game continues you won't become one of them.
IMO the real problem is that maybe 5% of the population are amoral sociopaths, and being absolutely heartless and uncaring - often with a liking for outright abuse and violence - gives them a competitive edge in almost any political and social system you can imagine.
Normal people just can't imagine that another human might operate like this.
But worse - many people seem to have some kind of bizarre deferential herd instinct to follow these crazies off the suicide cliff.
It may not be a fixable problem. We're a flawed species. Perhaps it won't be long before evolution - the ultimate owner of the casino - shrugs and moves on.
Those are difficult questions. Are we talking about how "happy" people are? That's the goal for some people, and an official goal for Bhutan according to its constitution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness). But I don't think we know very well how to measure it accurately.
It has been claimed that the move from hunter-gathering to agriculture brought a lot of misery while improving efficiency according to economic measures.
>IMO the real problem is that maybe 5% of the population are amoral sociopaths, and being absolutely heartless and uncaring - often with a liking for outright abuse and violence - gives them a competitive edge in almost any political and social system you can imagine.
Absolutely. Bob Menendez's indictment is the definition of: this is a powerful, already wealthy individual selling out the US people to a foreign government for, frankly, not a lot of money. Why? He may spend the rest of his life in prison.
How can anyone but a sociopath think that's a good trade?
This has been happening non stop since the 70s and the current state of America shows the results of 50 years of breakneck capitalism
What you’re seeing is that at this point it’s so entrenched that people can look at it and shrug instead of being horrified that instead of being a rare situation it’s “Business as usual”
Everyone should be horrified