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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Do you hear anything different from the parties right now? All I hear from Democrats is how they'll provide all sorts of things to the people who are suffering as a result of our perverted form of capitalism. But they've no plan to create real growth that would create jobs and living wages. They do not have any desire to do that because that would gore their donors, and in many instances, their own finances.
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If that is all you hear from Democrats, you aren't finding the right ways to listen to Democrats. You are certainly wrong about their reluctance to raise taxes. AOC just floated a big increase in the highest bracket, the point of which is to pay for stuff.
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OTOH, the GOP offers minimal safety nets and scoldings on "personal responsibility." That's hugely fucking productive. Perhaps if they just finger wag hard enough all those couch surfers will finally get off their asses and finish their graduate degrees.
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The objective of the finger-wagging is to provide cover for the haves to do nothing for the have nots.
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The free market hasn't failed. The free market has been hijacked by the finance industry. And the reason why isn't complex. Financing things is easy, there's minimal overhead, and it's never hard to get yourself paid, well. As a friend who works in institutional sales once explained to me, "The closer your job is to lots of money, the more money you're likely to get." Our culture is completely warped with this thinking. Everything's a hack to get around the slow and steady and often hard work it takes to make money, say, building things, or providing useful services. Too many people with brains with have decided to seek asymmetrical returns, or easiest guaranteed returns, by working with money rather than doing something for which they truly have a talent. If not for tech, I think innovation would be utterly flat, as Cowen cites in The Great Stagnation.
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There's no such thing as a free market. The government is full of Republicans who understand exactly how to use its levers to make themselves and their fellow travelers rich. In a free market, Paul Ryan wouldn't leave office and become a lobbyist.
