When it comes to the spicier cultural issues that generate flame wars online, I tend to find myself falling on the side of the conservatives. The exceptions to this are LGBT rights and drug use, but these days, these issues seem to divide more on old/young lines than conservative/liberal lines anyway.
I'm strongly against all forms of gun control. I believe that nations often have the responsibility to get involved in the affairs of other nations, including militarily. My diet consists mostly of red meat and I have a longstanding beef with vegans. I find media that overtly panders to minorities irritating whether or not I'm in said minority. I believe that wealthy liberals are intentionally and maliciously fanning the flames of race and gender conflicts to break down community bonds to make people easier to manipulate. Yadda yadda.
In short, when it comes to cultural views, I'm a milquetoast example of exactly what you'd expect to find from a young, online, cultural conservative, or at least libertarian.
And yet, despite all of this, I'm a Socialist. Not a Socialist-lite or Social Democrat in the vein of Bernie Sanders, but a dyed-in-the-wool Socialist.
I believe corporations are fundamentally evil to the core. I believe the overwhelming majority of working people in the US (and probably the world) are being ruthlessly exploited by a class of nobles we'd all be better off without. As a result, I believe we have an ethical responsibility to favor trade unions, strikes, and literally anything that protects workers from corporations. I believe the only realistic long-term result of unchecked Capitalism with rapidly improving technology is a dystopia. Yadda yadda.
Now, neither my cultural beliefs nor my economic beliefs are particularly unusual. The proportion of people in the US identifying as an Economic Leftists or Socialists has gone up every year since 1989, and the cultural conservatives, reactionaries, anti-progs, and anti-woke types are growing rapidly as well. Yet, I've never met anyone else in the overlap.
The combination of cultural Conservatism and economic Socialism is what's historically been called Populism, so that's how I'll be using that word. (I'm clarifying this because some people call Trump a "populist", but he's about as anti-socialist as someone can be, so I'm not using that word the same way as these people.)
Looking to the past, I can see lots of examples of this kind of Populism, especially in the first half of the 20th century, but practically nothing in the present. Libertarians are culturally liberal and economically conservative, and there's loads of them, so you'd think the opposite would also be true, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
With this in mind, I have 3 questions for this community:
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Why are there drastically fewer Populists today than there were in the past?
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Besides "Populist", what are some other names for the belief system I'm describing?
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Where are all the Populists that are left? I assume there's not literally zero, and that some of them hang out online together somewhere, so where are they? Are there populist blogs? Populist forums? Populist subreddits?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm usually tempted to stick to the direct question prompt or not say anything at all. But I'm going slightly off topic because I feel like MadMonzer gave a really good response. I'd like to pick your brain on socialism.
I'm libertarian. Your belief set is wild to me. Not the populist beliefs. I disagree with you that those beliefs are uncommon, but maybe that is because they are my polar opposite so I notice them more often, just like you think there are a bunch of libertarians everywhere. Its the socialist beliefs that I find wild.
I just can't ever see economic transactions as very evil, and to me most corporations are just lots of economic transactions scaled up massively. Meanwhile I find acts/threats of violence abhorrent, and see government as just scaling that up massively.
The "exploitation" narrative has never made sense to me. I'm selling labor, the corporations are buying it. Often times many different corporations are buying the labor. That price of labor is cheaper when lots of people are selling it. Just like products are cheaper for me when lots of corporations are selling them.
So that leads me to some questions:
I obviously recognize the horrors that can come from violence, and I believe that we should generally try to avoid it when resonable. But it's hard for me to call all violence bad when all civilizations, bad or good, are fundamentally based on the threat of violence. Even pacifists generally have some threshold for which they find violence acceptable. Personally, I would rather have to occasionally be in violent situations than live in poverty. Given that people enlist in the military as infantry by choice, I cannot be alone in this.
If I lived in the 1700s, I would probably be a libertarian. Technology hadn't advancad as far, and resources were more scarce, so if almost everyone didn't work hard for long hours, then everyone would starve, and a capitalist economy seems like a decent enough way to incentivize that.
It's difficult for me to say that today. Take my previous job for example. I have to work 40-50 hours per week just to not be homeless, while my boss's boss has to work, on average, about 1 hour per week. He's not particularly intelligent or productive; the only reason he doesn't have to work as much as I do is that he was born rich and I wasn't.
He didn't gain this wealth through hard work or taking risks, he gained it because his father was wealthy, who gained it because his father was weathy, who gained it because one of his ancestors found a silver mine under his property by accendent. I don't believe that he has a right to have double the free time that I do for the rest of his life while I don't just because he's from a weathly family.
Additionally, our company turns a substantial profit. I receive a very small proportion of that profit, and he receives 10 times that, despite the fact that his individual productivity is drastically lower than mine. I don't believe that he has a right to more of the profits than I do, when I am more productive than he is.
The irony is that the main thing preventing workers from just cutting out the middle man and refusing to give the owners their cut is that the state would side with the owners of the means of production, violently if necessary.
I could, in theory, quit and go to a different job, but that, in all likelyhood, would be exactly the same situation. I could start my own competing business, but I would be unlikely to ever be able to compete with my former employer, as they own the means of production, and have an economy of scale, and I would never be able to afford that.
Also, the rise of technology has led the average worker's productivity to skyrocket over the last few decades. Logically, this should lead to them being able to work drastically fewer hours for the same pay, but in reality, the average work week is the same it was 40 years ago, and average pay is about the same with respect to inflation.
As automation gets better and better, it should ideally lead to a society where we have to work less and less, and have more free time, but this is not the case for most people. Since our system is set up such that most people can only support themselves by working 40-50 hours per week, automation becomes a threat to out jobs rather than a benefit, because our system only gives people value insofar as they benefit the people who own the means of production.
I'll copy one of my other comments to answer this:
Personally, I believe the (usually local, sometimes state/province, and occasionally federal) government should control many industries, and private industry should be limited to industries that are difficult to put an objective value on, like entertainment. The purpose of this would be to ensure that workers should receive the value of their labor with minimal amounts given to management. Anyone should be able to start a government-owned businesses to allow some choices for consumers while still guaranteeing workers the value of their labor.
Additionally, I believe that the state should ensure that all their citizens receive the essentials, including a place to live, electric/water/internet, safe transportation around their town/city, and high-protein food.
I'm glad that we can agree incentives are necessary to some degree. I think I'd disagree on the amount of free floating wealth that is actually available today.
I think wealth inheritance often appears unfair when viewed from the children's generation, but fair when viewed from the parents generation. The inevitability of it also becomes obvious when viewed from the parents generation. If you survive to your old age and have a bunch of kids you love, and you are rich and well off, wouldn't you want to spend some of that money to make the people you love more comfortable? To have someone else then come in and say "no, thats not fair that your kid gets a nice life, they must work and suffer like everyone else". I might feel like "why did I bother to earn all that wealth then?". Preventing generational wealth transfers seems largely impossible without just completely destroying the concept of private wealth. I can't tell if you are fine with destroying the concept of private wealth, if you are then I'd like some idea of who is supposed to own things instead. And by ownerhsip I mean final or majority say in how an asset is used.
Does your boss have an ownership stake? He is being paid for that investment money, not for his productivity.
Think of it this way, there are three things you can do with wealth:
Ultimately most people want to consume wealth. Even preserving it is just is a way to delay consumption. Consuming wealth is also the least risky thing to do. You've done the thing, its over, its gone. It is rare that anyone can steal your past consumption of wealth. Preserving it for later consumption carries some risk. Someone might steal your stuff, or the thing you were holding lost its value for some reason. Maybe too many people were using it to store wealth, and not enough were actually valuing the thing being stored (these are called asset bubbles).
The most risky thing they can do is invest it. There is always a chance that a business will fail, or just that it will fail to return a bunch of profits. You might as well have consumed the wealth rather than investing it.
This is why there is a price to capital, and why you pay the investors. The more investors there are, the less you have to pay them. The more likely the investors are to lose their money, the more you have to pay them.
I'm assuming your boss has some form of ownership stake. He is getting paid for that ownership stake, and the risks associated.
No, there is actually nothing preventing the workers from owning the business. This is fully legal in the US, and quite a few socialists I have spoken to love to point out various examples of worker owned cooperatives. You are not allowed to steal something you didn't create. This goes back to what I discussed earlier, the various owners of the company chose to invest rather than consuming the wealth. Had they known their investment would just get stolen, obviously they would have just consumed it instead. This is both an implicit and explicit (legally codified) relationship that business owners have in most countries. The government says "we will not just steal all of your investment" and the currently wealthy people either believe them and invest, or they don't believe them and just consume or preserve their wealth. You basically want to reneg on that agreement and change the terms in a way that benefits yourself at their expense.
There are lots of rich people. They don't all get along, or even like each other. If you are short on capital there are such things as loans and investment. If your current company is also underpaying workers then you could eat their lunch by offering wage increases to their employees and stealing their talent. Very few businesses are permanently entrenched in the US, and many that are have done so through government edicts and support. There is a huge amount of turnover in the S&P 500 decade to decade.
If starting a business and potentially losing lots of money to your competitors sounds scary and risky, then realize that is what your current company's investors already went through. That is why they are earning outsized profits. Its a survivor bias. You meet the rich gamblers in Vegas because they can afford to stay around, all the poor sops who lost it all are dead or gone. By definition you work at the business that made it. Not at the business that failed. I obviously have no clue how much risk is involved, you haven't told me anything about the industry. What I do know is that there are rarely million dollar bills lying around on the sidewalk. The business you work in is likely within normal parameters for returns on risk, capital investment returns, and share of money paid to labor.
My career has generally been one where I work less and get paid roughly the same amount. I'm in web programming. I know its not the same for everyone. But I've also known plenty of people that don't work in the type of industries where productivity is drastically increasing.
There is also another thing to consider. I've talked so far about investors/owners in a business. You've talked about the workers. But we haven't talked much about the consumers. They exist and they have their own set of options. The price of the vast majority of goods and services have gone down over the last few decades. The huge exceptions to this are healthcare, education, and housing. They are each all their own massive topic, so I won't be getting into them.
I think in practice you'd find a lot of industries have degrees of subjective value involved. Communist countries have routinely run into these problems. What do you tell the iron nail factory to produce, and how do you know they are doing a good job? There was one point where they were judged based on how many nails they produced, so there were many tiny nails produced and not enough large ones. Then the metric was changed to weight of nails produced, and they just produced very large heavy nails. And nails as a product have been around for millenia they are one of the simplest products.
And do you not think management does anything? Have you never had a lazy co-worker who doesn't get much done? If you haven't then you've had amazing management and you should be singing their praises. More likely, you've had a lazy co-worker, and you were annoyed with management for not firing this person. But firing people is very unpleasant. Are you willing to punish a lazy worker that isn't doing their part? And if 'management' has the power to fire people, how do you know they won't just fire the people they dislike, rather than the unproductive ones?
Usually the answer to all of these questions is that you have to tie management's incentives to team productivity. So that if there is a lazy or unproductive worker the manager suffers from having that worker on the team. If all the people on the team are great then it should look like management is not doing anything. Management is sort of like the IT industry of economic systems. Everyone notices when they are doing badly, and everyone complains they are doing nothing when things run smoothly.
I am not highly against a welfare state. I just don't think we are really at the point to provide it. At best we can provide it to a small minority of people. Possibly most people that live in a first world nation. I would rather see us continue on the wealth creation process until welfare is affordable to everyone in the world, not just those born in the correct country. Welfare states tend to want to close their borders to foreigners, and one of the best welfare programs that exists is capitalism. It is unrivaled at raising the living standard for large groups of people. You yourself admitted it was great to have capitalism in the 18th century, but I'd like to point out that most of the world doesn't have much better living standards than what was available in 18th century Britain.
The engine of capitalism is chugging along and doing great things. And it pulled you and those around you out of poverty, and now you want to turn it off because the engine is loud and annoying. But there are lots of other people still waiting to be pulled out. I think it would be wrong to shut it off now. Once the poorest in the world can complain that they have to work 40 hours a week just to afford their home, food, and entertainment I might be willing to discuss shutting off the engine.
I would add that many people look at productivity statically. Maybe the bosses boss worked his ass off for thirty years and now makes strategic decisions but need not work the same grueling hours (ie he put his dues in and is being paid on the back half).
Dangling that carrot is a great incentive to get people to work their ads when young as well.
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The parents may consider it good, but I don't think even the most hardcore anarcho-capitalists would argue that it's fair, any more than it's fair that some people are born kings and some are born peasants.
I mean yeah that's kinda the idea. If I believe that it's bad for people to accumulate large quantities of wealth, then it follows that I would want to disincentivize that.
I mean I wouldn't be much of a Socialist if I didn't believe in getting rid of private property to some extent, but personally, I'm less concerned about the stuff you keep around the house and more the sort of thing that 99% of people would never be able to buy, like factories, refineries, large swaths of land and such.
Let's use a refinery as an example. Ideally, the refinery would be owned by the collective of everyone who works there. The decisions would be made by an individual elected by majority vote every few years.
This just sounds like another way of saying that because he has money, he doesn't have to work like the rest of us. This is what I have a problem with.
I don't disagree with this. Hell, half of what I post online is just variations of this exact statement. I'm very supportive of co-ops and the like. Just because I don't like Capitalism doesn't mean I'm unwilling to work within it. I'm no doomer.
I agree. That's why I'm not a huge fan of wealthy people taking things created by workers.
That seems uncharitable. I want to avoid making this sort of agreement in the first place.
I've heard the risk argument before and I've never bought it, mostly because taking a large quantity of risks is statistically equivalent to taking no risk. If you bet on one horse, you might go broke, but if you bet on 100 horses, you're virtually guaranteed to win a few. The gambling analogy isn't great because the average expected return is always negative, which isn't the case in investment. This is why virtually every extremely rich person has most of their money in investments, and why even the most risk-averse financial advisors support this.
If there's a job that doesn't have its productivity improved by automation, I haven't discovered it yet. Even the softest of social sciences benefit from automating routine paperwork.
I would add food to your list as well.
In other words, the things we don't need are getting cheaper and the things we do need are getting more expensive. The logical extreme of this sounds like a world where we're all constantly distracting ourselves from the fact that we're unhealthy, sick, and constantly at risk of homelessness, which feels very familiar.
When I say "difficult to put objective value on", I'm not talking about everything that could possibly be subjectively valued. I'm talking about things that are virtually impossible to value as they have no minimum value, like art.
Do I think they do nothing? No. Do I think they do enough to justify making triple what the people working for them make? Also no.
Also, while I've known a few lazy workers, most of them at least did enough work to look productive. I've known drastically more lazy managers who literally sat on their phones all day scrolling twitter.
As a final note, you seem to think I take issue with the existence of transactions, but I have no problem with these. If Peter has a million dollars and Paul has zero, and Peter pays Paul to perform services. I don't care about that transaction. I take issue with the fact that Peter has a million dollars and Paul has zero in the first place.
Imagine I work at ExxonMobil. Someone runs for election with the platform "retire now!". They gain control, sell the $206B in net assets, and give each of the 62300 employees a $3.3 million lump of cash.
Why wouldn't that happen to every company with low labor requirements? Would you just add a few million useless jobs to bring the shares down below retirement levels (actually, below time-to-find-a-new-job levels)? Require a buy-in from all new employees?
"Owned by everyone who works there" is probably not the best way I could have phrased it. What I'm picturing looks something like this, quoted from another comment:
Suppose you live in a town of 10000 people and you and 30 buddies believe that your town would be better off with a power plant.
In a Captialist economy, you'd all go to a wealthy investor and try to convince him of your hypothetical plant's ability to make him a lot of money if he invests in it. If you succeed, he'd fund your plant in exchange for most of the profits. This could be described as an investor-owned business.
In a Socialized economy, you'd all go to the town council to convince them that the plant would be a net positive for the town. The council would hold a vote of the entire town. If the vote passed, the town would fund your plant in exchange for a cut of the profits, which would be distributed to the people, either directly or through infrastructure. This would be a collective-owned (government-owned) business.
The advantage of this over an investor-owned business is that it scales better with automation. Suppose that the plant initially hires 50 people from the town. Then suppose, as is common, that improvements in technology enable the plant to be only manned by 10 people. Then suppose that all other businesses in the town do the same thing.
Under Capitalism, this would be good for the wealthy investor, and very bad for the town, as now most of the workers have been laid off and no longer benefit from the plant.
Whereas under Socialism, automation would be good for the town. Since everyone shares in the profits of the plant, everyone would benefit from improvements to the plant's productivity.
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Does everyone share in the losses as well? How good is the town's judgment?
If it's bad, do the residents become destitute after they spend their efforts on a doomed venture? If not, who is bailing them out?
If it's great, can they leverage it beyond their own borders? Would they even care to put in the effort if the benefits go to other people?
Also, that seems incredibly unstable or else totalitarian.
Imagine that someone wants to start a new business, and applies to the town. The town declines, so they decide to go it alone (Maybe it's capital-light like a sole-proprietorship hairdresser run from home. Maybe they can get money from elsewhere.) Does the town take the profits as if they had invested? If they don't, they'll be pushed into irrelevance unless they are the best judges of value in the entire market. If they do, they're hardly better than common thieves.
Indirectly, sure. A portion of their tax money is going to fund a venture in the hopes that the venture will make money for the town. If that venture fails to do so, they're not getting that money back. That sucks, but in most places I've lived, the chance of earning any profit from your tax revenue is effectively zero, and I'd rather be taking a calculated risk than a guaranteed loss.
If the whole town is insane enough to spend the entire town's budget on a single venture, sure, but there's not much point in discussing economics if we can't assume at least semi-rational actors.
No? Why would they? If I don't invest in Apple, I don't get profits from Apple. That makes no sense.
Then they won't be relevant for some businesses, which is fine. The point of this whole thing is to prevent too much power from being in the hands of a couple of rich investors, not to stop people who don't need investors in the first place. I'm not talking about flower shops and barbers, I'm talking about the kinds of industries you couldn't possibly start without an investor, hence the power plant example.
The solution seems incredibly simple: Don't tax away that money.
I was assuming they could still use normal financial strategies like loans, and would therefore be exposed to risk in excess of their investment. Regardless, the same effect could happen if they ended up with a net liability instead of an asset (like an environmentally-damaged site that required cleanup).
If they're financing everything with cash-on-hand, then how could they ever get anything done? Here's a small, true (slightly altered for privacy) story: A factory in my hometown shut down, and some local people banded together and bought it. If it had been purchased with cash split evenly by all the town's residents, it would be $10k each.
that was a textbook-perfect opportunity for your proposed system, but I don't see how it could happen. Is the town sitting on a $10 million war chest in case something interesting comes up? Do they levy a special tax and hope that everyone has savings? We know that they aren't going to outside lenders because that would expose the town to excess risk.
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Fairness is admittedly not a major concern of mine. You can't eat fairness. It would be more fair if we were all born into subsistence farming and lived a hard miserable life until the ripe age of 25. Lots of things could be more fair and awful. I think an approach of "eating the rich" (if it succeeds, rather than just transforming them into a "poor" politically powerful class) is more likely to just get rid of the rich and not improve anyone else's welfare. The math is really hard to get around. There are too many poor people still.
I think you would just discourage the acquisition of fungible or stealable forms of wealth. As has happened in many communist countries, powerful men just switch into the activity of controlling other directly.
You seem fine destroying all private incentives to create factories. Is this intentional? All the rich people invest right now because it is a safe thing to do with their money. The US system has set it up that way. If it was not a safe thing to do, then their behavior would change.
I'm sure you'd like to add food to successfully tell your story, but you'd be wrong to do so. Food has gotten cheaper as well. What hasn't gotten cheaper is labor. So any food you consume out at a restaurant, or any food that is labor intensive is likely to be more expensive. Which feels like something you would want, yes?
Its a hotly argued debate, but one of the believed causes of the cost increase for healthcare and education is also the increased cost of labor inputs for those activities. Its why medical tourism exists where you can go to a different country and get high quality doctors with high quality equipment for a fraction of the cost in the west. The place where you are saving a bunch of money is on labor, those doctors are not paid nearly as much as their western counterparts. And it is rarely just the doctors. Its the nurses. Its the cleaning staff. It is every person involved in the enterprise.
The cost of materials to build a house from the 1900's has decreased significantly. But no one wants those houses, they want modern homes that have a whole host of features.
I'm aware of what you meant. I'm telling you that the plan you have in your head is likely a very bad one. Because it has been done before and failed miserably a bunch of times. And I was trying to explain why/how it fails.
I wrote what I thought was a pretty succinct summary explaining why they get paid more, and why they sometimes look unproductive. Though perhaps it was too succinct. If a manager is not paid more then it becomes easy for the employee to simply bribe their managers. The other stuff I think I addressed quite well.
I think how peter has the million dollars is incredibly important. Imagine there is a singer that people like to hear. They find a big empty field that no one owns. And the singer sings for everyone there. There is enough people and enough wealth that the singer is able to do this for a year and eventually earn 1 million dollars. Do you think it is bad that the singer has 1 million dollars?
In some ways, we may be at a bit of an impasse here as this comes down to terminal values, which by definition can't really be argued. Like many people, I believe that fairness is an implicit good. I can't argue for this any more than I can argue that happiness is good and suffering is bad. It's one of those things you either believe or you don't. It's not my only terminal value, or even my top value, but it's still on the list. This isn't to say that it's impossible to have a nation that's fair and shitty, just that, all else being (no pun intended) equal, it's better to be fair than unfair.
Yes. This is practically the definition of Socialism. We do not want private entities to have the amount of money that would be required to do fund like this. "No one man should have all that power" and all that.
Maybe in the last 70 years, but in the last 15 years, it has pretty definitively gotten more expensive. Anecdotally, my grocery bill has nearly doubled (adjusting for inflation) in the last decade, and everything I've found in a quick google search has supported this conclusion.
Oddly enough, I completely agree with your points about healthcare and education. Doctors get paid way too much, which stems from them having an artificially low supply, which stems from them being required to attend 8 years of medical school regardless of specialty, which I think is one of the dumbest laws we have, up there with banning townhomes.
The cost of materials is not the primary cost of a home, it's the land, which has definitely increased.
Bribe them to do what? Not manage? If the manager has stake in the company and the worker has stake in the company, then both of their paychecks are determined by how well the company does and neither of them has incentive to make this trade. Now, I suppose they could choose to do so anyway, but an economics discussion seems a bit pointless if we don't assume rational actors.
I'm not sure, and to be honest, that's so far from the base case that I don't really care. Most of the time, the one doing the work and the one profiting the most from it are not the same person. In the vast majority of cases, people don't become successful singers by being good at singing. Sure that's necessary, but lots of people are good at singing. They become successful by getting a record deal, which is to say, convincing a rich person that they can get richer by funding their career. Even the ones who don't do this are either very independently wealthy or have a more informal contract with someone who is.
Generalize this to all industries, and it becomes apparent that almost all of the power is in the hands of a very small proportion of people. I believe this kind of power imbalance is inherently a very bad thing.
Re fairness, how don’t you end up with the conclusion in Harrison Bergeron? That is, if fairness is the primary concern then we need to uglify beautiful people, slow down athletic people, dumb down smart people, de-charm charming people, etc.
If we think this is wrong (because it leads to an ugly world) do you really value fairness? Or do you value fairness as but one of many competing values?
I mean yes, but I would say this is true for most values of anyone, as almost any single value, when taken to the logical extreme, would be horrifying unless you're a paperclipper.
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Could you share your calculations?
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