/townhall/ - Townhall

...even if we do not fix the thinking, there is only so far we can kick the can :c the shoe will fall... to delay only magnifies the severity. i cannot help but feel, we will be the generation left with the hot potato

>>11581
Yyyyyyep!

There sure has been a lot of can kicking (price capping, forced debt forgiveness, raising minimum wage, printing money without end, etc). All in the name of helping, but all of it just making the problem worse later on.

It will be an important lesson, I think. And even if we don't learn that lesson, we'll learn the fundamentals of a stable economy, mostly what productive work and normal quality of life actually look like.

Anyway, I could go into a lot of very controversial detail on this topic, but I want to hear a hot take of yours!

>>11580
>our current world-wide economic problem
I'm not even sure what that is.  I know there's inflation, but that's part of the economy, I think.  I'm led to believe many people find the economy the solution to all problems, really, not capable of having problems itself.

The worst take I ever seen personally on the ponysphere had been the remark that in order to make things change, you have to spill the blood of innocent people.

Like
instead of peaceful protesting, the only changes can be achieved by domestic terrorism.

It's horrible to think about.

>>11583
The economy, as far as I've seen, refers to the distribution and value of wealth and resources (including labor) among a population.

Currently, the value of the economy of the world is significantly inflated beyond what any government is willing to admit (a massive bubble) and the distribution of value and labor is significantly off balance and unstable (too much in one place and too little in others).

In short: Everyone is going to lose a lot of money very soon. So much that even basic things like food will be a problem (which is also being intentionally compromised by the malicious acts of governments, but that's a whole different can of worms).

>>11584
That's an astonishingly evil take. Like... straight up fictional villain levels of evil.

Such takes are getting more and more common these days, and it's kinda frightening to me.

This 'solution' of course has one glaring issue. There's no such thing as a 'collapse', that's basically a construct which tries to capture a whole range of possible sets of events within one word. The most obvious way things could 'collapse', rather than just being an event which is a hard reset of everything (which I'm taking to be the hoped for kind of 'collapse'), will be basically a check posed to everyone: how well suited are you to weather the time of troubles? For a random person chosen, if they are of means, they're also more likely to score higher on that metric. Therefore if everything collapses, if we look at that process by splitting the results by cohorts of levels of wealth, we'll see a relative concentration of power in the hands of the wealthy as that group will weather the 'collapse' the best, and these proportions would likely be then kept as overall things go back to where they are now. And those with wealth are also those with effective power and influence right now, which makes them those who are responsible for things sucking, for a net result of the world being even worse in the end, rather than better.

If you want a reset style of collapse, you have to actually work towards making it happen just right. En masse. And it won't be pretty, and you might also end up even worse than before even if you do succeed. But then that's a whole other can of worms. Bottom line, a 'collapse' won't save us, not even as a sort of unpleasant purge before things get better.

>>11587
Well, I didn't say it was a hot take for nothing.

I guess a better word or phrase than "collapse" would be a "forced restructuring". Definitely not a reset, which is very different and impossible to achieve.

As for the result, it depends on how you measure "better" and "worse".

If we do things right, we'll never end up as wealthy as we are now, because our current wealth and luxury is unsustainable and valueless. A "better" economy would be a sustainable one, not a wealthy one.

To clarify: Say you have two neighbors.

One lives in a tiny trailer, works a 9-5 blue collar job that they bike to, and has no debt.

The other lives in a large (mortgaged) home, has a new (financed) car, sells printed nail designs on etsy, and is deep in debt.

Extreme examples, but I think it gets the point across.

The first, while not the wealthiest or most luxurious, can live comfortably as they are for decades.

The second, while living an incredibly luxurious and "wealthy" life, cannot possibly stay that way, and will one day be forced to "restructure" if they don't start soon.

Currently, almost our entire first world economy, especially the US, is living like the second neighbor. Producing nothing of true value, living well beyond means, and impossibly deep in debt.

Either we start restructuring our economic setup now before the inflatable stilts pop, or we'll be forced to restructure it in much less favorable conditions.

As far as I can see, people are only going to learn if it's forced, and it looks like that's coming soon. In fact, I think it has already started.

A state inevitably must defend corrupt agents, even if it were to eventually correct the behavior down the line.
If a corrupt state actor is resisted, the state must back that actor until such a time as it can prove wrongdoing on its own time.
This is because states must prioritize authority, ultimately, over all else, as a matter of realpolitik.

Thus; A moral government cannot exist. No government can be just. They can be partly, balancing out for the majority, but ultimately all states regardless of their obligations will default to defending their own, first.
A moral state, ultimately, will fall out of that commitment when its authority is challenged.

>>11580
>I'm optimistic about it honestly
Can't say i disagree. The collapse of things is inevitable and a long time coming at this point.
As an American, it seems especially bad here, with the whole apparatus of the federal government collapsing in on itself.

I'm quite hopeful of the breaking down of that system and either the Balkanization, or perhaps the splintering of something different, for the United States.

Personally, my money's on Cyberpunk style corporate arcologies, city states, and so-called "wastelands" that in all practicality are safer than the cities albeit with more self reliant and ultimately difficult living.

>>11580
>Currently, the value of the economy of the world is significantly inflated beyond what any government is willing to admit

More money sounds good.

>the distribution of value and labor is significantly off balance and unstable (too much in one place and too little in others).

Isn't the economy itself suppose to be the authority on where money is.  Who may set themselves above the economy in judgement?

I guess the core problem with viewing massive social and economic collapse as a good and necessary thing is that if it happens there's literally no logical reason for the 10% or whatever clique of privileged Americans running the show currently to give a damn about the lives of everybody else.

Seriously.

What difference would it make to Elon Musk or your standard billionaire if a famine wipes out 1/3 of the country? Why would he care? What evidence is there that he would need to so anything? That he would want to do anything?

Why should the U.S. federal government do anything to prevent the horrific mass death of its citizens? There's no reason for it to do so under the current system. If there was a segment of those in power looking to turn away from the coming cliff, we'd have a heaping helping of democratic socialist reforms ranging from hiking taxes on the wealthy to ending the extermination of labor unions to the drastic expansion of nuclear power to the ending of discrimination in business hiring and so on. None of that's happening. The terrifying thing is that the category of Americans who think of themselves as superior to everybody else may just eat us like a big ameboa coming upon a smaller one. This may be our destiny.

>>11608
Funny, my perspective's been that if they cared, we'd see an end to the plethora of regulation, restriction, beuocracy, and taxation set in place to ensure only corporations get opportunity to succeed on their own.
Seems that a lack of competition due to government interference is greater issue to me than unions that also don't give a damn about the little guy 99% of the time in this country.

It's been made clear small business is the enemy of the regime.
Centralization of power is looked at as far more important.
Best example of this is probably the whole fiasco around Covid.
Running a small family store? Shut down immediately, you're killing people! Don't you know they all need to crowd into Walmart for their supplies, instead?

But I digress. It's not like you're wrong. It's why I'm on the side the system as a whole would be better served by collapsing, as well.

>>11609
Corporate power is media power is government power is religious power is scientific power and so on.

There's literally no difference.

The man in clerical robes, the man in the lab coat, the man in the general's uniform, the man in the business suit, and all the other faceless authoritarians who control America don't care about individual human rights. They don't care about you. They don't care about me.

I'll never understand why libertarians think that having your property destroyed and the rest of your freedoms crushed is all great and wonderful if it's claimed that a non-state actor does it. I'll never get why I'm supposed to think that Elon Musk or any other billionaire has my best interests in mind in a way that makes them angels and the likes of Joe Biden and other politicans devils. I see no angels when I look up.

If the modern American corporation can be ethically compared to any prior institution, the Kremlin during Chernobyl comes to mind.

Again, it would be fantastic if we had a democratic socialist revolution based on the idea of individual freedom and human rights with the goal of America becoming a 'rainbow nation'. No more identity politics where the powerful control almost all of the wealth and the populace get intentionally set against each other via religion, race, sexual orientation, and so on to scramble for crumbs. Preventing collapse through an end to our current authoritarianism. I'm not holding my breath.

>>11611
You say all this as though unions aren't run by faceless suits, too.

Regardless; I certainly don't care for corporate rule either.
I had rather clearly spoken against such things. Small business =/= big corporations like Walmart, after all.

Small businesses can still be dicks to their workers, but the damage is more concentrated with a significantly easier resistance.
It's not like the plethora of overarching companies 'too big to fail' that have their claws in major sections of the economy with nigh complete control.

These institutions by large have procured and solidified their power by state intervention. The corn industry is probably one of the best examples. Monsanto has a stranglehold, and it's entirely due to legal abuse of patents, lobbying and getting heafty kickbacks, and ensuring their products are unscritinuzed while others get the book thrown at them locked Down for ages.

In any case: they won't give power up willingly.
And the web of connections and relations is woven too tightly to snip the bad out
Collapse is the only way to rip the rot out.

>>11613
It would be nice to think that total collapse would end modern corporate capitalism and the authoritarianism that it has created, but why assume so?

Why can't the elite in charge just ride out the collapse? Dust off their shoulders and live on? It makes literally zero difference to them if America goes through something like a genocide. They'll sit in their mansions. They'll have their suits dry cleaned. They'll watch their televisions. They already have near infinite ability to sustain themselves and nothing save an asteroid hitting Earth will change that fact.

You and I are as butterflies. They are as mountains. That's that.

>>11614
>but why assume so?
Because the only reason the sheep accept it as it currently stands is that's how it's been, already.
They will claim "well it could be worse" to suggestion of resistance and change.
Worse still, they buy in to the presumption of morality ascribed by the state. That law is inherently just, that these institutions inherently deserve our cooperation.

A collapse removes the option of simply supporting what already exists.

>Why can't the elite in charge just ride out the collapse?
What kind of collapse are you thinking of?

Perhaps if the 'collapse' is simply something like a great depression with some balkanization, that'd happen.
But when I say 'collapse' I'm meaning far more fully.

Money is meaningless without the state that backs it.
Ownership likewise is the domain of those who can hold what's theirs.
Corporations will not have money, and in turn, no means to hold what they claim is theirs.
Best the millionaires can do is flee the country.

I think you greatly underestimate the connection between wealth and the state, here.
We are no longer on the gold standard
Our money is backed by nothing more that the word of our government.
Mansions can't be held on empty promises. Not against the desperate and vindictive.

>>11616
I don't like using the term sheep, but I guess I will temporarily. A problem is that you don't really seem to realize that the sheep have been told this since birth. Christians are better than non-Christians. Whites are better than non-whites. Cisgender heterosexuals are better than the LGBT. Wealthy people are better than poorer people. Handsome and beautiful people are better than less attractive people. And so on over and over again.

The sheep have been brainwashed basically out of the womb to worship corporate capitalism and the various other levers of power that is a part of that system. Americans will literally kill themselves out of shame and guilt due to economic hardship. And due to being transgender. And due to being percieved as ugly. And it goes on. That's how complete the indoctrination that the elite are your betters and you'd better worship them as well as try to be like them.

You can achieve a full revolution with a Thanos snaps his fingers level cleansing in terms of body count, or a collapse that has the exact same consequences, but the desire to be dominated has been carved into the hearts of the sheep. Alas. It's tough to imagine real progress there.

And when it comes to collapse in terms of the wellbeing of the elite... again, the wealthy and powerful in America literally are like our gods. Organized religion could disappear overnight. There would still be the financial system. That could vanish too. There would be the media. Ditto. There would still be the military. It goes on.

Is it really that likely that the elite can go down just from a mere collapse? Even a total collapse? When they control housing? Medical care? Foodstuffs? Even water? Every last one of those is a corporate product managed by Wall Street. I'm uncertain.

Only the winning party of an election should have to pay taxes (or receive direct benefits of said taxes).

>>11639
Now that's a hot take! And it makes total sense too.

Hilariously, I almost agree with it.

Though, in my opinion, the better solution would be to require 2/3 of the votes to pass any law in the legislature. Can't get 2/3? No new law.

And in the US, the existing supermajority requirements should be bumped up from 2/3 to 4/5.

>>11648
The core problem with the 2/3 majority requirement for legislatures without changing anything else is that executive branch officials from Presidents to Governors on down can still crush individual freedom and personal liberty without much pushback. If anything, the situation gets even worse for human rights because even a clear majority who oppose government oppression and have a voice in different offices will be prevented by definition from passing laws in the legislature on this. Not to mention that the court systems can still stomp on people expressing their liberty like ants too.

I mean this is literally what's been happening in the U.S. today in terms of anything to do with sex and romance, with statist conservatives pushing for strict government control over people's bodies and minds getting what they want outside of legislatures then blocking legislatures from responding to the majority popular opinion against such statism. It doesn't matter if the people as a whole find nothing wrong with interracial couples knocking boots or with families using contraception or whatever. The minority setting up the rules do have hang-ups, and the majority can't get their views represented.

>>11662
>...executive branch officials from Presidents to Governors on down can still crush individual freedom and personal liberty without much pushback.
Most of the pushback to the executive branch is done through the judicial branch, and investigations and committees performed by the legislative branch. Executive branch pushback isn't done via the passing of laws, so the 2/3 requirement doesn't affect it.

> If anything, the situation gets even worse for human rights because even a clear majority who oppose government oppression and have a voice in different offices will be prevented by definition from passing laws in the legislature on this.
I don't see how that works given that a "clear majority" would easily accomplish a 2/3 vote.

If only a little over half the country thinks that some law should be in place, but the rest believe it shouldn't, then it shouldn't be in place until a clear majority supports it.

The only laws that should ever be put in place should be laws that a supermajority of the people under that government support.

>>11664
I guess it's just that I'm looking at the situation from the lens of liberty and human rights rather than the technical matters of who makes what law.

If the executive branch or judiciary pushes through something where government boots stamp on faces, I want it to be as easy as possible for a liberty loving legislature to repeal that.

Same if the dynamic is an oppressive, domineering government at the state, county, or city level being stopped by activists for liberty at some alternate point of administration.

It's rather unethical to begin with for measures reducing human rights to keep spreading across the U.S. to begin with, but its adding insult to injury that the 1/2 to 2/3 majority of the public doesn't want all this to happen.

The apartheid South Africa esque situation in America of a small extremist faction who wants oppressive social engineering getting their way because of the inability of majority rule to allow for laws promoting liberty and human rights to get passed... morally it seems simply evil to me.

At some point, regular people just should be free to live their lives happy and open without a straightjacket being fitted upon them, no matter how much the half or third or such authoritarian wing of the public insists on this comformity.

>>11665
Regardless of how a system is set up, there will always be a way to abuse it.

In most cases, more laws = less liberty = more abuse of human rights by the government.

My opinion is that that abuse can be minimized if the government is heavily restricted from being able to act out it's authoritarian goals, one of those suggested restrictions being that it can't do anything without an obvious majority approval from the people.

Laws that reduce human rights would have a much harder time passing if they were required to get a 2/3 vote.

On a side note, another idea I had was that the repealing of laws should only require a simple majority, allowing for laws that reduce human rights to easily be removed once the people begin to see that such a law is wrong.

>>11669
Making more laws => having less liberty makes no logical sense at all whatsoever because repealing previous laws => making more laws.

If it was up to me, there would be a federal government group and related nongovernmental movement out focused solely on repealing things.

>>11679
>repealing previous laws => making more laws.
That looks like exactly the opposite of how it works. I don't quite understand what you're saying with this.

Repealing laws doesn't result in more laws being created. It does the opposite unless it was a law that shouldn't have been repealed in the first place.

Unless you are considering the repealing of a law to be a law, which I do not. For all intents and purposes, both "laws" cancel and can be thrown out of consideration entirely.

When I talk about "laws", I'm not talking about bills, I'm talking about codified restrictions, requirements, or procedures that are enforced by the government. Repealed bills, and the bills repealing them, aren't enforced in any way, and so are not "laws", by my definition.

My hottest take is probably my most lukewarm one, but I like that can contribute to society most every day. I like staying home and playing games but I know if that's all I did then it would start fucking with my brain something fierce. I'm doing it for money and without the money I wouldn't be doing it, and there is absolutely exploitation, but making things better for strangers, even only incrementally so, is stabilizing. It feels nice to contribute to the world in a positive way.

Senator Joseph McCarthy did nothing wrong.

Voluntary human extinction is the only morally correct solution.

>>11705
That's quite a final solution!

>>11705
That sounds like a maximum of passive misanthropy.

>>11580
I think I understand how this works.

>Hot takes!
It should be OK to not go to college and still do important...even, dare I say, academical or smart...things in life.

<spoiler>
Or college should be more accessible, affordable, and not give me a feeling of having something to do with class division (although I'm sure people will tell me how wrong that feeling is, I still feel it.)
</spoiler>

My hottest take might be that we need full blown anarchy, which I wonder about sometimes.

Not just the elimination of government but the destruction of every form of interpersonal authority by which one person enslaves another. No organized religion. No business structures that aren't flatly democratic. No military or paramilitary groups. No parental """"rights"""" on determining the beliefs and identities of their children. No... nothing.

People are just people. Everything is open. Everything is free. Everyone is free.