weird social media person: hey, watch this. pennies fall upward! professor of something: pennies fall downward MAGA house member: the government is knows all about the antigravity devices and is hiding the truth people on X: antigravity is real people on BlueSky: i’ll never speak to those morons
Text: It is a sign of how corrupt political debate has become that these patent monopolies, which are equivalent to tariffs of many thousand percent, are referred to as the “free market” in most discussions. Patent monopolies have a clear public purpose, to promote innovation, but they are nonetheless a major form of government intervention in the market. These government-granted monopolies cost us around $500 billion a year in the case of prescription drugs ($4,000 per family). They are not the free market.
i mean, it's only rational to vote for him. he has so much seniority! think about the good he can do for our state with all that influence.
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Bye!
Yes. That's precisely a fair account of the view I've expressed. You are a very constructive interlocutor. Have an amazing day!
Please enjoy your fairy tales. It has been a pleasure.
we live in a world of imperfect perceptions, observations, "data". of course to live and govern we need to refer to these things. there's nothing wrong with discussing, referring to, observations and data. 1/
but there's much wrong with pulling rank, collecting authority, demanding deference, insisting the observations to which you point, your aggregations and interpretations thereof, are reliable, the one true way of seeing and understanding the world, those who disagree are cretins to be suppressed. /f
Oh god. Yes, the poor dears, tens of thousands of dollars in debt for what two generations prior was almost free. It's all the feelz. You my friend are a prime illustration of what I take to be the problem. I am certain the, well, feeling is mutual.
Larry Summers can talk about whatever the fuck, he's been a brutal obstacle to any kind of positive change. You have a very nice day.
lots was wrong with that era. if you rotten cherry pick the worst, of course it sounds awful. i'd not trade a return of Jim Crow for anything. nobody wants to go back to what was awful about that era.
but important things were good about that era. it was a time when we could make progress on civil rights, because the "white" public felt affluent. a generous spirit was not a kiss of death for politicians, as it is now.
the kids who rebelled perceived themselves as affluent! they resented inauthenticity, being cogs in a machine, militarism, in the richest society the world had ever known. today's kids don't feel rich. they feel insecure, indebted.
the goal is not to go back to any era. the goal is to understand what's good in a society, and income and wealth compression — we're all in the same boat, we have similar interests, we can govern coherently together — are things that are good in a society, which we once had much more than we do now.
yes. and wealth inequality is also brings income equality we pretend not to see bc it takes the form of asset revaluation. talk to @steveroth.bsky.social for a while. while center-leftists crowed abt wages growing a few percent from tiny baselines at the bottom, assets appreciated at breakneck pace.
absolutely. we are left with nothing more objective than mind, judgment, persuasion. that is our actual condition. when we pull rank about what's objective, we are usually wrong, often destructively so.
yes. lots of conditions were objectively worse. and yet, we were a much stronger society. because society is a word. we are not merely a collection of individual circumstances. we are better off poorer + well-knit as a society than fabulously rich and fraying. of course, best would be knit + rich!
from a baseline when income and wealth was much more compressed. from a US 1960s-1970s baseline. from a contemporary Nordic baseline, although they let income and wealth stretch much too far at the top. there are societies in which "we are all in it together", and absolute wealth matters much less.
is it the bottom 50%? come on. aggregate economic numbers tell you about the animal spirits of the affluent.
yes. not impossible, or at least not impossible for everyone. excuse the hyperbole. impossible for a lot of people, who do not understand why the goods that came free with what seemed like the ordinary, middle class lives of their upbringings, are things they fail to reliably secure.
what is "inflation", pray? is it a fact in the world? does "wages rising faster than inflation" correspond to "an improving standard of living" in a reliable, meaningful way? what is the role of relative wealth changes favoring the top vs slight compression of wages from tiny baselines @ the bottom?
you use the word "fact" about things that do not even exist in the world, that are human constructions not actual phenomena, that are not even "social facts" in the sense of becoming real by virtue of their social consequences.
you tell yourself stories, imagine they are "objective", when there is more, much more, than enough freedom in what we actually observe about actual circumstances, for those stories to be 180 degrees wrong, in human welfare terms, yet your comfort yourself. these are facts.
they are not.
collapse, civil war, the cause of these things won't be ennui. but even as the machetes bite, they will tell themselves it was.
data has become the opiate of the professionals, inkblots only they can properly interpret, from which they weave accounts of the world in which everything is fine for everybody if only they wouldn’t change anything serious, and anything who says otherwise is objectively, mockably wrong.
insufficient stimulus, “financial reform” that saved and cemented the role of extractive incumbents rather than restructuring anything, a health reform that i have to admit is better than what preceded it, but from my own experience of it i admit that only through the angriest, most gritted teeth.