Damnit Sugarfree! You think your the only schmuck around here with no time to toss something together??
Here’s one where Krugabe questions who is out of touch with reality.
Will the Democratic presidential nomination go to a centrist or a progressive? Which choice would give the party the best chance in next year’s election? Honestly, I have no idea.
This is good tack to take, given your inability to predict anything, including things you are purported to be an expert.
One thing I can say, however, is that neither centrism nor progressivism is what it used to be.
There was a time when arguments between centrists and progressives were framed as debates between realism and idealism. These days, however, it often seems as if the centrists, not the progressives, are out of touch with reality. Indeed, sometimes it feels as if centrists are Rip Van Winkles who spent the last 20 years in a cave and missed everything that has happened to America and the world since the 1990s.
You can see this in politics, where Joe Biden has repeatedly declared that Republicans will have an “epiphany” once Donald Trump is gone, and once again become reasonable people Democrats can deal with. Given the GOP’s scorched-earth politics during the Obama years, that’s a bizarre claim.
Turnabout is fair play asshole, team cuck simply decided to start playing by the same rules team cunt played by–since forever, really. Which is par for the course for team cuck, it takes them 20 years or more to come around to anything.
You can also see it in economics. There are many reasonable criticisms you could offer of Elizabeth Warren’s economic proposals. But the one I keep seeing is that Warren would turn America into (cue scary music) Europe, maybe even (cue even scarier music) France. And you have to wonder whether people who say such things have paid any attention to either Europe or America over the past few decades.
We know where France is located dumbass.
Just to be clear, Europe does have big economic problems. But they’re not the ones such people seem to imagine.
When people say such things, they seem to have in mind a picture of the U.S.-Europe comparison that did seem to have some validity in the 1990s. In that picture, nations with large social spending and extensive government regulation of markets suffered from “Eurosclerosis,” persistent lack of jobs.
Employers, the story went, were reluctant to expand both because of high taxes and because they feared not being able to fire workers once hired. At the same time, workers had little incentive to accept jobs because they could live off generous social programs.
Europe also seemed to be lagging in the adoption of new technology: For a while, the U.S. surged ahead in making use of the internet and information technology in general, leading to arguments that Europe’s high taxes and regulation were discouraging innovation.
But all of that was a long time ago. The jobs gap has largely vanished; adults in their prime working years are actually more likely to be employed in Europe, France included, than they are in America.
Any gap in the adoption of information technology has also long since vanished; households in much of Europe are as or more likely to have broadband than their U.S. counterparts, partly because the U.S. failure to limit providers’ monopoly power has led to much higher prices for internet access.
Unemployment for the EU this year (that is 2019, not sometime in the 1990’s) is 6.3%, with France being 8.6%. Lets compare that to the United States at 3.6%. While you cherry-pick the price of broadband in Europe ($90 EU vs. $200 US) these savings seem to be moot compared to the price Europeans pay to heat their homes, drive cars, or even anything else…here’s a rundown of the cost of basic things between the US and Germany, for example.
Then again the price of anything is determined by it’s demand, and is influenced by a variety of factors. It seems silly to pick one product and simply declare one country is doing something better than the other. The fact of the matter it is often much more complicated than that, but since your average reader probably cunt count to 12 without the physical deformity of a sixth digit on each hand, you can get away with cherry-picking.
It’s true that European nations have lower GDP per capita than we do, but that’s largely because, unlike most Americans, most Europeans actually have significant vacation time and hence work fewer hours per year. This sounds like a choice about work-life balance, not an economic problem.
And on that most fundamental of indicators, life expectancy, the U.S. has fallen far behind: French residents can expect, on average, to live more than four years longer than Americans. Why? Universal health care and policies that mitigate extreme inequality are the most likely explanations.
Now, I don’t want this to sound like praise of all things European. The nations on the euro remain terribly vulnerable to financial crises, because they’ve adopted a shared currency without a shared banking safety net; only the heroic leadership of Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank, avoided a catastrophic collapse of the euro in 2012.
Europe also suffers from persistent weakness in demand because key players, Germany in particular, have an obsessive fear of deficits, even when the European economy desperately needs stimulus.
They’re right to fear it. The cost of them ruling over the continent now appears to be paying for Spain and Italy to take naps in the afternoon, the Turks to commit atrocities against the Kurds, the French to go on vacation, and for the Greeks to do…whatever it is they do, rather than be productive.
These are big problems, severe enough that I wouldn’t be surprised if Europe is the epicenter of the next global crisis. But the problem with Europe is not that its social programs are too generous and its governments too intrusive. If anything, it’s almost the opposite: Europe’s economy is vulnerable because a combination of political fragmentation and ideological rigidity has left its politicians unwilling to be Keynesian enough.
When all else fails–PROG HARDER.
The point is that centrists who point to Europe as an illustration of the bad things that happen when you’re too enthusiastic about pursuing social justice are stuck decades in the past. Modern European experience actually vindicates progressive claims that we can do a lot to make America fairer without destroying incentives. And even Europe’s problems make the case for more government intervention, not less.
By all means, let’s talk about whether “Medicare for all,” wealth taxes and other progressive proposals are actually good ideas. But trying to shoot them down by going on about how terrible things are in France is a sure sign that you have no idea what you’re talking about.
That’s fair. Medicare for all, is a fucking retarded idea that will bankrupt the country, let alone multiple hospitals and health care providers that will suddenly find their profit margins have gone to hell. Wealth taxes will result in people fleeing the country, or holding their wealth offshore–like what happened when they tried it in France. Except nobody is shooting is down because of how much a shithole France is, they’re shooting it down because we have practical experience from experiments with these progressive proposals BECAUSE THEY WAS TRIED IN FRANCE YOU DUMBASS.
To generalize, we want X, and doing it requires people, materials, management, in general cash, mullah, dough. So the debate boils down to who uses these things better and I struggle to understand how some believe it is the government.
Competition is a race to the bottom is also popular, although what this is based on escapes me. Certainly not of the high quality of government monopoly services or the how bureaucrats strive to make things easier on the public. Not when privatizing certain services or introducing competition usually is accompanied by significant improvements in efficiency. In competitive private sectors, plenty of high quality products are made, unlike government owned businesses thorough history. So what is this race to the bottom?
But I want to give an example of what I mean. The significant innovation and cost reduction introduced in the field of space exploration. SpaceX – whatever you may think of E.M. – is quite the success. This was clear when European government audits a while back informed the European Space Agency that it will be in no way competitive in the future if it does not radically change its MO. And the ESA and Ariane and their other contractors reacted by starting to research reusable rockets, using in part SpaceX innovations, by contracting with more companies and startup, by pushing innovation. This raises the question: why did they not really do this before competition forced it? Why I think this is relevant? Because, if you want to see a field which does attract the best and brightest, this is it. These are people who are at the top of their field, the best education, and furthermore many of them do work they enjoy and are passionate about. And still, without some competition, they were complacent for years and the innovation rate quite slowed down. If in this field this happened, why expect differently for others?
There is a meme going around depicting Monopoly, the classic Parker Brother’s game from the 1930s, if the board was designed in a manner to suit Kamala Harris. I found it funny, but I also thought it was missing a couple spaces for taxes and began thought experiments on some of the other candidates and how Monopoly would look for them. Warren for example would be nothing but spaces for Income Tax and Luxury Tax. Sanders would alternate between tax spaces, communal housing, players wouldn’t be able to purchase any of the properties, nor would they be able to land on Boardwalk and Park place as they are both Dachas, nobody gets to be the racecar, and of course Sanders himself is the banker and only pays in black bread. Wiliamson would be a bunch of pot dispensaries, yoga studios, hipster eateries, the railroads are electric and the pieces are all different colored crystals. Booker has the distinction of simultaneously having or not having a version of Monopoly with his name as being racist.
