gog
5mo ago
"The luxury of the spendthrift slackers is paid for by the industrious" is not an economic argument, it's a moral one. I don't see the resemblance to Broken Windows- can you clarify?
gog
5mo ago
While it might be morally offensive that these spendthrift slackers aren’t working as hard as you are, economically it doesn’t matter very much. You can think of your own prosperity in terms of absolute (nominal) numbers, but the real value of your wealth matters a lot more, and the real value of your wealth depends on your relative position in the economy- what fraction of the total economy you own.
If all government aid to these people were switched off overnight and your 27% tax bill were reduced to zero, you would own 27% more of the economy than you do now, but government spending is such a large part of the economy that the total size of the economy would be much less, possibly more than 27% less, which would cancel out your gain. So you wouldn’t be much richer, you might be poorer, and your relative status would be much lower because the median income would skyrocket (because the parasite class would be dead).
gog
6mo ago
They want whomever they believe to be low-status in the culture to have more status. They believe everything is a social construct, and so they conclude that status is not earned, but granted by authorities to preferred classes of people, and stigma to disfavoured classes. Cultural marxists want to become the status/stigma-granting authority, and for them this means controlling art and education. In the US they’re primarily concerned with black people. In Canada they’re concerned about indigenous people. In Europe they’re concerned about migrants or something. You can question whether status actually works this way, but you can’t dispute that this attitude toward status is widespread all across the political spectrum.
gog
6mo ago
"They" is the disadvantaged. And if "they" won't seize the means of cultural production, then a cultural Lenin or Lenins has to do it for them. When the welfare state (mid-20th century, which explains your timeline) solved economic problems but none of the attendant social problems in marginalized communities, it seemed like maybe the problem was cultural power. If no one lacks anything material, but you still don't have the equality you were looking for, maybe you need a black little mermaid.
gog
6mo ago
OG Marxism says that the key to true freedom is for the proletariat to seize the means of industrial production because they are materially oppressed. Cultural Marxism says they need to seize the means of cultural production (art, universities, etc) because they are socially oppressed. Replace "economic status" with "cultural status." Hence "cultural Marxism."
I almost never do good deeds. This is my chief complaint about welfare statism. Virtue has been abdicated to the state- you can’t really be charitable because everyone is looked after. You can’t really be brave because everything is safe. Social atomization (arguably also a consequence of statism) makes it hard even to help someone move a couch because they don’t want to “bother you.” This makes practicing active virtues really had and makes real friendship really hard, because there is so little need for you to help anyone; friendship has been reduced to hanging out.
When life was harder, we needed each other a lot more. That doing one good deed makes us think of “accolades” is a sign of how weird the current situation is. I once got a call in the middle of the night to bring gas to a guy who had run out and I was SO happy. That was like 7 years ago. Ask people for more! Give them the chance to be virtuous!
gog
8mo ago
The tough-guy/hot chick tattoos of yesteryear are mostly finished in the wild. Some 40 year-olds who didn't get the memo still get them, but most of the tattoos I see nowadays are just crappy line doodles of flowers or mountains or whatever on the floppy, under-toned triceps of 20 year old girls. These don't communicate criminality or BPD or sluttiness like they did in the old days- they signal (intentionally or not) total conformity to Latest Thing. They look stupid, but I wouldn't even say they look ugly- they just look like she got pen on her arm, like an accident. Tattoos as threat- or sexual availability-signals I could at least understand, but I don't understand these new ones at all.
gog
9mo ago
I was printing off copies of the article every day back when it first came out because I didn't trust the correction notices. Over about 4 days the article got softer and softer with no notice of correction provided. It went from "human remains" to "GPR hits" to "possible graves". It was only like 6 months later, after the GPR company publicly said "we never said they were remains," that the CBC started saying "sites of concern."
Note that their articles announcing actual excavations that have turned up nothing, they preface the story with "This article contains disturbing details," which is tipping the hand a little.
gog
9mo ago
I worked at a daycare for one glorious year. Kids a little less than a year old were dropped off at 7 and picked up at 5. One kid screamed for the entire duration, every day, for months. The other kids just screamed for a week. The attendants cuddled the babies, but they mostly left them on the floor to crawl around. By the time they graduated to the 2-year-old room, the kids were merely supervised, rather than attended to. This was a budget daycare, but not unusually so. The 12th kid on a farm would get a lot more attention than these babies, certainly until age 2 or so, and it would be maternal or sororal attention, rather than "minimum wage demands that I hold you for 10 minutes every hour). Furthermore, even a baby left alone in the corner of the kitchen while the mother makes johnny cakes (or whatever 12-child farm families eat) is still in its mother's presence. Daycare babies are not.
Government spending on these sorts of programs is so huge that anyone old enough to be posting here would not live long enough to see things shake out if things ever switched, assuming they survived the violence that such a transition would probably involve. If we were setting up a society from scratch, then the current system would be something to avoid, certainly. Having come as far down this road as we have, though, any benefits from switching would fall mainly on generations to come. That might be a great thing, but "duty to future generations" is a moral, not an economic argument. I'm not defending the morality of the system, just explaining that it's not the simple math problem OP seems to think it is.
Furthermore, all of the experiments (I assume you're talking about free-market vs socialist countries) have converged on wild government spending. Unless you say that REAL capitalism has never been tried, then maybe 90% of the population recirculating the wealth produced by the remaining 10% is just how it works? Maybe that's the true triumph of post-scarcity industrial victory: welfare grift and BS jobs for the lucky majority and productive, morally-pure, toil for the unfortunate few.
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