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The Servant Economy: Where America's Elite is Sending the Middle Class
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  • What good ideas? People dismiss her for good reason. There are no good ideas or even new ideas in anything she ever wrote. She was also a lousy novelist. She was media personality and pop philosopher. The Sean Hannity of her time. Sorry but I think you give this early TV character far too much credit.

  • @brianl

    Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against—then you’ll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We’re after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you’d better get wise to it. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there it that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of lawbreakers—and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Rearden, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”

    Atlas Shrugged.

  • @brianl

    It is very bad habit to decline and not learn and read just because some model in your head. It can be right model to some degree, but most of the time you think it is right and it is wrong. So any input help.

  • of course, it's wise to form opinions from source material rather than on what others say about the source material. but again, i see nothing in the above passage, nothing in her other writings, and nothing in second hand sources that warrant creating a near complete intellectual framework to live by. and omg, in the us so many do precisely that. her following is cultish. rand is a contagion thats infected our political leadership even. there isnt a single person, not jesus, not ghandi, not machiavelli, jefferson, mao, no one, particularly, ayn fucking rand, that deserves such unquestioning following. with all the great minds of history, it`s disturbing that so many have invested themselves in such a person, but thats what happens with the culture of celebrity. sexy packaging and the ensuing media exposure triumphs again. i really wish people would stop making ayn rand, jesus, rush limbaugh and other such screwballs into intellectual gods deserving worship. thats the real danger, much more so than depending on second hand information sources.

  • @brianl

    I think you wrote all post describing your mind model and your emotional opinion (plus some people who also made some strange models). :-) Talk here was about exactly opposite - use different and opposing views and data, including one you do not like, ones that do not fit in your model to improve your model.

  • @Vitaliy I try to do that. I just don't find Rand credible and I feel there are much better sources for ideas that differ from my own. Using different and opposing views is great, but I don't think we should use EVERY opposing view.

  • @brianl Your reliance upon and defense of second hand sources is completely the problem.

  • is there something i said that would suggest i have no first hand experience with rand`s books and lectures? ive read her work, seen interviews of her, and most embarrassing of all, seen the trainwreck of a movie. so lets put that strawman to bed. i can say she sucks, just like i can say mark twain sucks, but since most scholars and critics consider twain one of americas greatest writers, it is not a tenable position. similarly, since rand is considered a joke by most scholars, to turn her rhetoric into a belief system is perilous if you want to be taken seriously. but if you think she is awesome, have at her.

  • similarly, since rand is considered a joke by most scholars

    I've never met anyone who "worships" Ayn Rand... and I certainly do not myself. I only became familiar with her work after people said my own philosophy (I concluded my self) had some similarities to the ideas Atlas Shrugged. Now... the opinions of scholars, in the case of Ayn Rands work is mostly useless, as scholars are depended on the State for their income and salaries. Therefore, any philosophy that is opposed to more taxation will be opposed by scholars and academia. This is really basic observation.

    Whenever a figure is so hated by a certain group, ask yourself "where do they get their money?"... it's easy to predict their options based on this.

    There are no good ideas or even new ideas in anything she ever wrote.

    Ok, so then just pretend these are old ideas from before she wrote them. Easy. And if they're not good ideas, then offer some counter points. Saying ideas are "not good" is not an argument or indicative of an accurate assessment.

  • She did write the motto of most indie filmmakers :)

    The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me. - Ayn Rand


    On the other hand... here's an article by a former Randian: Atlas Flunked/ I Was A Teenage Randroid By Jason Heller

    Emboldened by the clean, innocent, robotic arrogance of Rand characters like Howard Roark and Dagny Taggart, I let my inner asshole loose. I spoke to people with rude, brutal honesty. I walked down the street with my head high, my face expressionless. I was openly disdainful of poor people, my own family included. In other words, I became a practicing sociopath.

    https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/atlas-flunked/

  • Great link jleo! I think I'm in love! The guy nailed it.

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    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-04-29/new-normal-american-dream-homeownership-rate-plunges-19-year-low-asking-rents-soar-r

    If you view on this as on birth control method and special tax all will fit into place.

    Btw horrible situation with education prices is also from same opera.

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  • Whenever a figure is so hated by a certain group, ask yourself "where do they get their money?"... it's easy to predict their options based on this.

    Presumably that would also apply to your own ideas? Or is it only other people's ideas which are dictated by self-interest?

    In any event, if true, it of course works both ways: we would predict that "scholars" from the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, Americans for Prosperity, etc. will advocate for tax cuts and reduced government regulation, since they're all funded by billionaires who want to pay less taxes and be free of governmental regulation, and who have been known to compare raising their marginal tax rates by 2 or 3 points (from 15%!) to the Nazi invasion of Poland. And surprise! The "scholars" from these institutions all advocate less taxes and regulation. Who would have guessed?

    OTOH, there is such a thing as evidence. For example, do tax cuts and less government regulation actually promote economic growth -- or do they simply concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands and socialize the costs of doing business? It's easy enough to find out the answer, if your mind isn't made up in advance.

  • OTOH, there is such a thing as evidence. For example, do tax cuts and less government regulation actually promote economic growth -- or do they simply concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands and socialize the costs of doing business? It's easy enough to find out the answer, if your mind isn't made up in advance.

    In reality it is all complicated. Sadly government does not consist from angels (usually it is quite opposite species). Same for free market proponents and capitalists, especially small.

    Idea that somehow static simple solution exist is wrong. Nature is complex thing, same is the society.

    We had extremely stable situation because all complexity issues and conflicts were solved with more energy and resources. Real conflicts is visible due to shortages of this things. And it'll be quite nasty and cruel. Same as nature.

  • About the price of education in US, I live in college town. A vanilla 3 bedroom unfurnished apartment rents for about $5,000 per month.

  • Idea that somehow static simple solution exist is wrong. Nature is complex thing, same is the society.

    I don't claim to be able to foretell the future, or to say what might have happened in the past if things had been different.

    In this case, however, it's a simple matter of assessing evidence which already exists, and outcomes which are already known. Did claims for one policy or other prove to be true in a finite period under limited circumstances? We should be able to arrive at that much.

  • OTOH, there is such a thing as evidence. For example, do tax cuts and less government regulation actually promote economic growth -- or do they simply concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands and socialize the costs of doing business?

    You cannot socialize the cost of doing business without a large State or Oligarchy. And this is exactly what is funded with our taxes.

    And yes, tax cuts and and less regulation do promote growth as "regulations" are simply just barriers to entry for the middle and lower classes. Taxation of "the rich" is irrelevant as it's, again, not a Zero-Sum game and the taxed money doesn't magically flow into the hands of the poor. In fact, without central control and manipulation of currency, the rich-hording chunks money would actually have a deflationary effect... and would make what ever the poor could save worth allot more.

  • A lot more of nothing is still nothing. And prices don't just deflate or increase because of what central banks do to influence interest rates. Businesses tend to charge what they think the market will bear and will raise prices accordingly.

    The poor, and ever larger swathes of the middle class, do not save money (at least in the US), and many of them have their backs to the wall because of the costs of rent, healthcare, utility bills. In the US most of these are wholly or largely run by businesses and people cannot choose not to pay because they are necessities. But even if they run out of money, business keep charging more if they can. And for healthcare in particular, they can because the government has to pick up the tab.

    Sooner or later the US debt will not be sustainable and will crash the world economy if something isn't done. So-called US conservatives harp on about the debt but they are the ones that pushed the country into this, and took on the lions share of the debt under their administrations.

    Anyway, the rich have never had it so good, and the wealthiest have something like 40% more money than they did only 20 years ago. If someone wants to challenge that I'll find some stats, but I don't know why this is considered acceptable by anyone.

  • And yes, tax cuts and and less regulation do promote growth as "regulations" are simply just barriers to entry for the middle and lower classes. Taxation of "the rich" is irrelevant as it's, again, not a Zero-Sum game and the taxed money doesn't magically flow into the hands of the poor.

    You don't prove your case by issuing declarations, without supporting evidence -- unless all you're really interested in is preaching to the choir of yourself.

    There's plenty evidence on the effect of tax cuts on the U.S. economy and the effectiveness of various forms of redistribution (include upward redistribution), including the example of societies which have very different policies and results than ours. You might want to look at it some time.

  • So-called US conservatives harp on about the debt but they are the ones that pushed the country into this, and took on the lions share of the debt under their administrations.

    No, sorry, you can't pin it on one ideology in the US. Both conservatives and liberals have expanded the government and racked up their own versions of entitlement spending. And there's not way around it, debt comes from unfunded or misappropriated entitlements. There's no debt if everyone just pay for their own shit, to be blunt.

    Anyways, how can you talk about conservatives pushing the country into debt, when it was the Clinton administration that forced banks to sell bogus mortgages? The Democrats are at fault for that one...

    And no, I'm not defending everything conservatives do, and only blaming Democrats, but if you haven't noticed, all our government has been doing for the last 100 years is passing laws and giving special-group benefits that make their administration look good during office, then deferring, shifting, and masking the debt until the other party has to deal with the costs. It's non-stop game of hot-potato. Both parties do this constantly. It's the nature of politics.

    and the wealthiest have something like 40% more money than they did only 20 years ago. If someone wants to challenge that I'll find some stats, but I don't know why this is considered acceptable by anyone.

    Well, if they actually earned it by producing useful products and running legitimate services, then who cares? You're still thinking in terms of a Zero-Sum game. Yes, unfortunately, we have made some aspects of economics quite zero-sum... but on the philosophical level... one mans wealth is not another loss unless he has set up some agency of coercion. And yes, the philosophy is important to get right so we don't just end up stripping people's money away out of animal-level jealousy and spite. In the case of bankers and politicians? Yes, absolutely, they should have their assets stripped. But who will do this? Who regulates the regulators? More regulation... to solve the issue of unaccountable-regulation? A political 1% to solve the problem of an economic 1%? This is all just fighting fire with gasoline.

    including the example of societies which have very different policies and results than ours.

    These societies don't exist in a vacuum. For example, many countries with socialized medicine can do so because they're calculating the costs with other market-based countries. The medical innovations they use have to be payed for and developed by someone. Then you also have to take into account population size and genetic homogeneity. Allot of things that work in small-homogenous societies don't work for entire industrial countries with diverse populations.

  • From the creator of Babylon 5:

    THE RULES OF THE NEW ARISTOCRACY

    If you or your kids want to start a business, you will find that because we’ve sucked all the money out of the economy, there is simply no available cash around to help you finance your startup. (Unless you want to go to your friends online at sites like Indiegogo, and isn’t that just cute?) We just cut our kids a check and tell them to go have fun.

    Your kids are born with a glass ceiling above which they will almost certainly never have the opportunity to rise. Our kids are born with a marble floor beneath which they will never be allowed to fall.

    -------

    The world we have carefully constructed for you is like one of those boardwalk games of chance where if you knock down the big pins with a baseball, you win a huge prize. But the pins are weighted and positioned so that you will never, ever knock them down. Yet you’ll keep paying anyway, and keep throwing, until you exhaust yourself and your wallet. And we like it that way.

    We don’t want you to have opportunities, we don’t want you to have an education, we don’t want you to have a voice in what happens to you, we don’t want you healthy, we don’t want you to do anything but be frightened, helpless, docile consumers who will eat and watch and buy what we tell you to eat and watch and buy while we keep all the good stuff to ourselves.

    Because you’re not in our club.

    Because we are the New Aristocracy.

    And you are the New Peasants. And we very, very, very much like it that way..

    https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=760992300602302&id=139652459402959

    Joseph Michael Straczynski ... is an American writer and producer. He works in films, television series, novels, short stories, comic books, radio dramas and other media. Straczynski is a playwright, former journalist, and author of The Complete Book of Scriptwriting. He was the creator and showrunner for the science fiction television series Babylon 5, its spin-off Crusade, as well as Jeremiah, a series loosely based on Hermann Huppen's comics.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Michael_Straczynski

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    Truth is painfully obvious: a middle class lifestyle is unaffordable to all but the top 20%. This reality is destabilizing to the current arrangement, i.e. debt-based consumerism a.k.a. neofeudal state-cartel capitalism, so it is actively suppressed by the officially sanctioned narrative: that middle class status is attainable by almost every household with two earners (a mere $50,000 annual household income makes one middle class) and middle class wealth is increasing.

    http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.ru/2014/05/the-destabilizing-truth-only-wealthy.html

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  • Another good chart:

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    Young adults, age 18 to 34, are most likely to feel the dream is unattainable, with 63% saying it's impossible.

    http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/04/news/economy/american-dream/index.html

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  • What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?

    I see pitchforks.

    At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.

    Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.

    http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html