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Honestly, this seems to be the number one political realization for me lately. Everything I blame on liberals or communists or progressives or whoever can often be boiled down to simple economics, capitalism running totally out of control. Immigration is generally what I relate that with. Economic incentives for bringing in foreigners who are willing to work for pennies should be obvious, and it's a pill that almost every wealthy capitalist society with a labor differential is swallowing. So it is unsurprising to me that football is exactly the same way.
I think problems stemming from capitalism are going to be hard to solve from a conservative point of view. Admit that capitalism causes it and you're giving ground to the communists.
No, it's not. That's an excuse. They'll claim they're doing things for money when they're actually doing it for politics. Hard to say with Bad Bunny, but when they were making female Ghostbusters and cancelling Roseanne and Cops, it was quite clear.
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I'd disagree.
Capitalism has been the most effective tool in history to make the material lives of humans - all of them - demonstrably and unequivocally better. Climate control, cheap indoor plumbing, and internal combustion engines mean that the basic standard of living in the west has outpaced that of royalty not three hundred years ago.
I'd say that most of the "problems of capitalism" are bad feedback loops from efforts to solve the "problems of capitalism." Since you brought up immigration, it makes sense to link to a previous comment.
Capitalism seeking to drive down the prices of labor isn't bad on its own. People can choose to change their skillset, their industry focus, what have you. Immigrants, even low skilled ones, can perhaps improve their lives through immigration because of disparities in national wealth. It can be a positive sum game for all involved.
But then the regulations and legislation enter the system and fuck everything up. Illegal immigrants work for under the table cash and therefore outcompete native born labor that desires to work in a pro-social and citizen-responsible manner (i.e. reporting income appropriately). If they, the natives, do that, however, they are no longer price competitive - but not because of a market mechanism! It's because of an illegal and anti-social defection from the established norms and rules of the market.
Likewise with social safety net programs. For someone who desires to be pro-social and not explot the system, they may use whatever program during periods of unemployment or if there's a serious chronic medical issue. Others will simply falsify records and enjoy free money (something something Somali daycares in minnesota). Then there's perverse incentives -- maybe I do actually have a fucked up back and can only work for 20 hours a week. But, wait, if I do, I might lose my disability. So, instead of sort of 50/50ing it, I just double down on disability payments - and "new" symptoms - to close the gap. It's a shitty existence, but the government won't allow me to supplement my benefits with honest work. People respond to incentives.
I hear you when you're saying you're mad about capitalism. The point I'm trying to make is that what we currently have is a misshapen low-fidelity imitation of capitalism that allows for social defection without punishing it, rent seeking, and regulatory capture. PMC striving and credentialism are reflections of that. Parasitic client-party relationships between illegal and legal immigrants and various democratic statist organizations are the worst reflections of that.
If you're an NFL player, however, you've seen your earnings explode over the last ten years. Owners as well. Fans have received more games with more parity between teams - gone are the days of laugher blowouts. As a football fan, if you couldn't tell, I'll stomach a Viva La Revolucion superbowl half time show because I know none of that shit is going to show up next fall during week six during an important home game. The overall product of football is better across the board; for players, owners, and customers (fans). The capitalist market is working. Does it have any cultural or traditional loyalty? No, and I'd argue that's a good thing. If we start mixing markets and culture, we start looking Chinese in a hurry.
I kind of regret that I wrote "there is no loyalty, there is no tradition, there is only profit and loss." It's way too heavy and blackpilly. An accurate reframing would be "there is no good old boys club, there is no secret handshake anymore, all that matters is how you perform." A bit brutal, sure, but that means the door is open in ways it previously wasn't.
Wall Street and Big Law are famous for mostly hiring from the "prestigious" schools. And that has made them horribly non-innovative and brittle institutions who only continue to exist because of regulatory capture. The big tech firms, although they did have preferences for Stanford/MIT CS grads, are (were?) famous for also hiring kids from weird less-than-awesome schools if they had a cool GitHub repo, or built an app with their friends. For a while there was even a hack of doing something like ycombinator, not really caring about winning the startup race, but just getting the ability to get to San Francisco, network and demonstrate competence, and then get hired. That dried up after it caused too much lack of faith in new ycombinator founders - who need to be laser focused on
giga-hype, fraud, and graftbuilding the technologies of tomorrow.TLDR: Capitalism is as good as you long as you let it be. The more you fuck with it, the less capitalism you have and the more you prevent the fruit of it from ripening.
I don't think oats is saying he hates capitalism, more that he's saying that capitalism has seemingly learned that being partisan can also be profitable. The left is more likely to make purchasing decisions based on politics. Thus the "free market" party is ill-equipped to handle it, because the bean counters are telling everyone to charge full steam ahead.
Though as an aside, I think "What if we brought down wages and benefits so citizens can compete with immigrants" is on par with "What if we made all the farmers become factory workers?"
I'm not saying we should bring down wages. We should let the market determine the effective wage.
But we should be far, far, far more aggressive in prosecuting tax cheats and outright illegal employment. Because, right now, working a modest W-2 job (i.e. less than median household income) is literally a suckers game.
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There's a nationalist-shaped hole in the discourse since WWII.
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