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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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An actual labor shortage means that every business owner who owns two mansions and three cars has to sell one of their mansions and one of their cars unless they want to lose their entire income and become homeless.

Weren't you just arguing that labor shortages were good and made people better off? Now you're saying that it means business owners have to sell homes and cars and are at risk of homelessness.

Nope. It means that the people who want or need something done need to pay more to have it done, otherwise the employee will stop working and find somewhere else to work. You only need a very small amount of “temporarily can’t do it” or “need to do it suboptimally” to accomplish this, only 1 out of 1000 projects, a civilizationally-irrelevant amount.

So your argument here that things people value and want done will be less affordable?

I think what you’re getting at is, “I want to trade the suffering of the poor for greater tech development”.

I know a poor rural family with a smartphone for every member, clean drinking water available when they want, healthcare from Medicaid, a PS5 with a virtual reality headset (seriously, think of how insane it is that even a rather poor family has personal virtual reality now) , nice tasty food from all around the world with spices many in the past would have never tasted. Their life has luxuries that even the richest and most powerful people a few hundred years ago could only dream of, and that was only possible because of tech development. Even the Rothschild's can not compare to what a fast food worker today can access.

Like hunger in the US is basically non-existent! People don't starve to death except by choice, whereas just a few centuries ago famines were common across the world. In fact today's poor are so well off that having too many calories is significantly more common than getting too little calories. The idea that the poor are suffering from economic growth is complete and obvious hogwash. How bad is it for the poor that they and their kids survive, instead of up to 30% of them dying before their first birthdays?

If turn-of-the-century infant death rates had continued, then an estimated 500,000 live-born infants during 1997 would have died before age 1 year; instead, 28,045 infants died (3).

We saved ~471,955 infants in just one year, many of them to poor families.

Really the only thing that is worse than the past is housing, and not by quality or size (like even the poor have indoor plumbing! The richest a few hundred years ago were still shitting in outhouses or dumping it out on the streets) mind you but by price. And that is a deliberate choice by cities and states around the country to artificially restrict the new supply of homes because even the limited resources of land is used more efficiently than ever.