Like them, hate them, or consider them genderfluid TikToking herbivores, but one thing the zoomers undoubtedly get right is that they know the value of their labor and aren’t afraid to spell out their conditions to seething boomers.
Behold…the entitled generation: pic.twitter.com/Rjl0gN8TqZ
— Natalie F Danelishen (@Chesschick01) August 11, 2021
Isn’t this, like, the free market at work? Why would a supposed “libertarian” have a problem with this?
The combination of Corona gibs, forced savings (fewer vacations, dining out, etc.), and zoomers being much more financially literate relative to previous generations means they have lots of cash at their disposal. Safety net = more room to negotiate –> employee’s market.
It’s also very good for the economy. Can’t find someone to “stand there and ensure safety on a 1 lane dirt road” for a pittance? Well, perhaps such a joke job shouldn’t exist in the first place>?
The post-Corona economy sort of strikes as something of a preview of what UBI would be like. Greater productivity. Labor gets much more negotiating power. Sign on bonuses, once the preserve of highly skilled and sought after technical workers, are now being offered by some McDonald’s outlets. Billionaires might have become richer, but so did most everyone with investments outside gold and fiat. In tech, remote work has become the norm. Shitty employers offering shit jobs whine about the “entitled” ingrates who are driving them out of business.
Meanwhile, as I half suspected would happen at the outset of the pandemic, most everyone else wins.
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Fake boom that will shatter when the inevitable currency resets and introduction of consumption micromanagement comes. Besides, we all lose some “freedoms”, whatever that is.
That will not be the picture when the dust finally settles, in 2030.
I assume the ‘road safety’ position is for a ”flagman” guys who stop traffic in one direction so cars going the other direction can proceed” because of road construction. Not a high skill job for sure and boring as hell too so I wasn’t surprised to find its been automated.
A builder needed to widen the road here and instead of hiring flagmen he got three portable traffic lights to direct traffic. One at each end of the several hundred meter long project and one in the middle where an office complex parking lot intersects the road. Don’t know if the portable traffic lights use sensors to detect how many cars are waiting to proceed, timers or both but they’ve been there for a month and if annoying to have one more traffic light to get to where I need to go its got to be cheaper for the builder to rent three portable traffic lights than hire three temporary employees ( who might not show up and then what? )
Probably depends on local regs, and there are some places you can’t automate it. I assume flagman is an occupation invented to prevent the widespread abuse of police officers getting ridiculous overtime pay, even in sleepy suburbs.
You were mostly right (older people using internet, retail apocalypse, more bureaucracy moving online, more work from home, reshoring, masks, surveillance), but turns out someone did miss GameStop. 😉
I think you got about 2/3, which is actually really, really good for predictions; most of these pundits barely get anything right. Good job! (Do you do the rationalist prediction-benchmark thing, or is that too soyish?)
In the past, jobs offering shit pay that could be off-shored were offshored, and those that couldn’t be automated were given to recent immigrants willing to take shit pay (for example, look at the non-TSA staff at your local airport or pretty much all lower-level healthcare workers, and more than a few doctors). At some point you run out of low-hanging fruit.
Thank you, Boomers, for going along with this and helping to screw the Western world and your grandchildren, because it means the day of the immigrant with a fluffy pillow for you in the old-folks’ home is closer than you think.
These sound like wind-up artists to me and not serious job applicants. Also, I’m not sure why traffic safety in road construction is a joke job. Boring yes but these are probably union positions with good benefits.
I was a bit baffled by the post. At least in the US (where presumably these posts are from), most of the anger I’ve seen is people frustrated by the greatly enhanced unemployment benefits during covid. Getting extended unemployment, and an extra $300/week from the federal government makes working many jobs pointless. Folks are scratching their heads over how the people still working are going to pay for all these outlays.
Describing the current situation as “free market” or “libertarian” seems willfully dense.
Instead of coming up with all sorts of palatable and correct reasons as to why the Zoomers are so fussy about going to work, why not just point to the obvious and tell it like it is: They’re a lazy and a coddled bunch that prefer sleeping in late, hanging around their sofas watching TV and gaming on the internet. Once their source of money dries up, they’ll be looking for jobs where they can flip burgers or even become over industrious “flagmen”. 🙂
I recently talked to a Manager. He said it’s nowadays hard to find people for executive jobs because most want young people want a “work-life balance” and decline promotion
I have a hard time reading those conversations and thinking that the candidate isn’t a troll, or that the whole interaction isn’t just a gag.
There will be tax increases, but it wont be nearly enough to cover the deficits. The government never really considers ways to pay for its hasty and often out of control spending patterns. The ability to print money out of thin air is what’s fueling this destructive trend. Inflation is already raising its ugly head, and this is just the beginning…
Then those jobs are pointless and should be automated or eliminated through organizational changes. Just because corporate managers are lazy and uncreative doesn’t mean people owe them free labor.
“People still working” never pay for “all these outlays”. First off, at Federal level, US government tax revenue is always around 18% GDP. Doesn’t matter the tax rate. So ” people still working” always pay the same amount, proportional to income, outlays have nothing to do with it.
And second, for that to change, US government will have to start running budget surpluses (surplus means taxes actually go to repay past outlays), which hasn’t happen in recent US history (aside like one year by accident during Pets dot com boom), and will never happen again.
So no, “people still working” never paid for those outlays and never will. That’s what budget deficit means.
No such thing as free market and never was. We live in a fiat currency world and that means we must print money to survive.
Your choices are: 1) neoliberalism where by definition commercial banking system prints magic fiat and gives it as credit lines to the rich and corporations; or 2) state driven development and aggregate demand support where central banks print exact same magic fiat and give it as credit lines to the government.
Neoliberalism has been dead since 2008. We are entirely state and central bank driven now. Giving free money to the rich is less efficient than giving free money to the poor, so income support for the poor is a better policy choice.
The last time US had an actual tax increase was in 1941-1945.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
US then built the most powerful economy in the world through state investment and planning.
That’s not what US government bonds are saying. US government can borrow at 1.3% and market can’t get enough of government debt. It is irresponsible to not give market what it craves.
I have met John Galt and it turns out he’s US Treasuries trader lol.
No, No, No, you have it all wrong.
“The Market” is only good if it is driving wages down and rents and profits up!
“The Market” is bad if it is driving wages up, and forcing employers to make more efficient use of now-valuable labor by investing in productive technologies. We can’t have that! The government MUST intervene by opening the border to the overpopulated third world, forcing population growth higher and flooding the labor market.
Prediction: this ‘labor shortage,’ (assuming its even real), won’t last very long.
Millennials and Zoomers have some odd college-induced job expectations as far as “safe spaces” and wanting to endlessly discuss their feelz, etc… but I’m 100% behind them re: pushing for more pay, more benefits and legit working condition improvements.
Boomers and to a lesser extent Xers were gaslit with libertarianism and have been lapdogs for greedhead employers.
That has to change even if we have to eye-roll through some of these kids child-psych/self-development arglebargle.
What jobs can they take when much of them can be automated? That is why many are advocating for UBI to “absorb” the masses of excess labor made obsolete. Which will go away when state organizational ability and/or remaining institutional trust vaporizes (what happens at the end of Late Antiquity)
I think libertarians and indeed many economists suggests reduction on both taxation and budget, which is basically removing state functions and putting them back into the market/civil society. You can debate whether this will lead to better outcomes (it is downstream from what social structures you have), but budget deficits are not inevitable.
There have been many free markets but those are efficient when culture and ideology enable them. Fiat currency was a choice made by the American Imperialists and it can be changed (in fact there are shifts to crypto which are sounder than fiat). Our survival depends on real production, which can seldom be stimulated by money printing, but mostly independent and often hindered by inflationism.
This is of course bad. Which is why there is the concept of 100% reserves, i.e. muggle saving money.
That will approach some sort of central planning which can work suboptimally for some time and have serious inbalances building up later on.
It is actually a good thing to experiment economic theories since they will all fail. But
.
The base was already there and built by “robber barons” who actually massively lowered basic good prices thu mass production.
It has been systematically repressed and we need to see for 3-6 months for the inevitable upward adjustment.
I’m sorry, I wish Keynesian economics can be applied to this world too, but clearly it is running on Randian logic for a decade or two now.
Are you sure you’re not a pseudonym for Anatoly Karlin? He described the current situation as free market. You’re asserting that being unable to compete with extended, augmented unemployment benefits means employers want “free labor.” WTF?
If we revert to unemployment policy of 18 months ago, things will quickly revert to normal. If you like the current policy, why stop at $300/week? Why not $600/week and really screw over employers?
Yes, we have been running a deficit. Perhaps you noticed the deficit has increased dramatically over the past year? How long is paying people not to work sustainable? Having fiat currency doesn’t mean we have to think up new ways to spend even more money.
My explanation: someone posted this job ad in some kind of online forum for stoners.
Prospective employees and employers negotiate the terms of their contract in an open and competitive labor market, without the state or any other institution dictating where employees should go or whom employers should hire (as under central planning).
So in what way, precisely, is this not a free market? (A shift in the supply and demand curves for labor has nothing to do with whether said market is “free” or not).
Thanks. I used to do it yearly but it’s a bit too much of a hassle. Over time I’ve also come to question it’s worth since realistically speaking, it’s easy to game. (Answer a lot of questions close to what predictions markets/Metaculus says, and you’re guaranteed a pretty good score… actually making money off it would seem to be the best gauge of success, but PredictIt’s range of questions is quite limited).
Of course governments subsidize both employers and employees in almost every country. In the US health insurance costs got shifted onto employers during WW2 as wage and price controls prevented employers from offering higher wages to lure workers to their factories. Since then employers have been trying to off load these costs back onto their employees. In other countries governments offer everyone basic healthcare to their citizens and others have hybrid systems where you can get basic government healthcare but if you want the best you have to pay for it.
Where minimum wages don’t offer enough income for a worker to feed a family the government steps in and offers extra cash or subsidizes food for low income workers thus freeing employers from having to pay higher wages.
Then there are differences in how housing costs are paid for. Some countries offer subsidized housing especially for low income people while others do not. This too affects wage levels employers must pay.
These distortions in labor markets have real effects on private industry. Its why the Southern states in the US have been gaining jobs and population while high cost/high tax Northern states have been losing jobs and population
You are fucking delusional. $300 is chump change in today’s money, and does not even come close to compensating for a lack of a paycheck, even on top of unemployment “benefits”. That $300 needs to be $5,000.
The fact of the matter is the white small business owners are, in every sense of the word, the stereotypical Jews they are always complaining about on Unz. Anything less than $25/hour is not worth doing in today’s America, so the penny pinching white business owners are either going to have to invest in their countrymen, or go out of business. And their failure will reflect entirelt on themselves and not their employees, who consistently brought them record-smashing profits year-after-year.
Given the proven track record of failure of American small businesses, families and small towns, this should come as no surprise. You can’t fix rotten.
They can work for themselves or their community. Clean their own streets or whatever, if they don’t have to donate their time to corporation in order to survive.
As somebody who works in real production, we are getting automated and real production share of GDP will decline in any successful economy. Real production depends on only two things – cheap credit, and consumer demand. If my reactor breaks down, i will need a credit line with low interest rate to pay to replace it. And i need consumers to buy stuff to clear out the warehouses . I don’t care where the money comes from – Federal Reserve or Bank of America. Its all the same to me, and machines don’t care either. Doubling production output is simply a matter of entering a number on computer – as long as i can clear the warehouses, higher production is actually easier than lower production target. So keep printing i say.
Hence you introduce income support and let consumer make choices. This will rebalance the market.
Robber barons got rich on World War I government contracts. It was the only reason they invested in mass production – government driven them for war purposes. Same deal with prior generation – those barons got rich on government Civil War spending. It is always government that drives investment by guaranteeing demand. Same with Ronald Reagan and his exploding budget deficits.
Nope. Won’t be allowed. US government is the most important institution and it can’t survive high interest rates. So high interest rates won’t happen.
Well, whatever you want to call it, but government spending was the only driving force for economic growth in recent years. In 2019, US nominal GDP growth was 5%, same as US budget deficit. Private sector did nothing.
We will be distributing whatever income support to achieve nominal GDP growth target. If our nominal GDP growth rate target is 5%, and $600/wk gets us there, then $600/wk it is. If it takes $1,000/wk, then $1,000 it is.
Nominal GDP growth matters, subsidy number does not.
If we stop, US will go into a Great Depression, and then into a Russia style economic collapse.
This curve must be maintained at all costs, or we all die. All I’m saying is giving free money to the poor is cheaper and more efficient than giving free money to the rich. But to not give free money is not an option.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TCMDO
UBI will only seal the deal.
It’s amazing how a truly free economy scares people. It’s actually the most ideal form of “libertarianism”, because now most people can genuinely try pursuing a path they desire, but most importantly, even if they accomplish nothing, they can stay out of other people’s way (instead of being a socially expensive street junkie, etc.) The upending of pointless established orders (programming businesses with mandatory HQs, etc.) is equally joyous.
The only step up from this is mass availability of free energy devices.
Of course it does. House flipping and other finance speculation, healthcare, and weapons manufacturing are key US economic activities. Can you imagine telling homeowners their housing wealth is worth 50% at best as interest rates normalize? Can you imagine them as their 401k’s and pensions turn to dust as stock and bond markets collapse?
Can you imagine old people as Social Security checks stop coming and Medicare disappears as US government enters bankruptcy (there’s no way Federal budget can handle even 5% interest rate)?
Can you you imagine Lockheed Martin aerospace engineers getting fired en masse and forced to drive taxis for a living as government won’t buy their fighter jets anymore?
Can you imagine doctors driven from their Mercedes cars into poverty because in reality, without government protecting their cartel with regulation and subsidy, there’s not much economic value in adding 2 years of life to an obese diabetic and so those sick people will be left on the side of the road to die.
Can you imagine all those young entrepreneurs starving because once stock market collapses, so will speculative venture capital to fund them as they are entirely dependent on cheap credit. No more American innovation.
You are talking transforming modern US into Russia circa 1992. Of course that scares people. I’ve been there, lived that, can’t blame them.
I’m not sure how representative these posts are. Asheville NC is a hipster/slacker magnet town, sort of a Portland of the Appalachians.
LOL if you believe any of that will ever happen (sad because it’s probably wishful thinking). DOW + NASDAQ are the gold standards of the world economy, everybody including China and Putin (hard to refer to Russia as anything but “Putin” anymore) both want them to continue climbing as if their lives depend on it.
A welcome anecdote. We want an economy where labor markets are tight, the labor share of GDP is “high” and by extension, workers have options. It’s hard to think of any sort of welfare program that beats having tight, lower-end labor markets. It’s not paradise, there are trade offs, lower-upper-middleclass goons like I get fewer restaurant meals and affordable lunches, but it can be done. Iceland, Denmark, Australia give you a sense of what this world looks like, or 1970s USA.
You could do this with immigration reform and industrial policy, but maybe you can also do it by regularly throwing the proles and underclass a stimulus check. It’s remarkable how shortsighted sub-proles are. You give them $1,000 and they stop working until the money runs out.This gives the more reliable lower-skilled workers more leverage, their wages aren’t undercut by the lumpenproletariat.
That’s why money printing and budget deficits are not stopping any time soon. And rates won’t be going up either.
Zoomers trying to get in on the grift is precious. Unfortunately it’s not only boomers they need to compete with.
Asheville is a unique place. The majority of the population are either very, very rich leftists, very, very poor leftists, or natives.
Most of the rich leftists are celebrities or retired New Yorkers, often by way of Florida. The poor leftists are mostly strung-out hippies from all over.
The natives tend to be Baptists whose families have lived in the area for centuries, some as far back as the 17th century. They range from illiterate hillbillies to struggling middle-class. Very few are wealthy. They do not mix much with leftists.
Often, the spoilt children of wealth wandering the road looking for themselves would pass through Asheville. One used to be able to see them relaxing in packs downtown, playing guitars and wearing shoes which no ordinary hippie could afford. Locals referred to them as “trustafarians”.
Assuming the people in those exchanges aren’t wind-up artists, they could well be trustafarians who lost the password to Daddy’s bank website. It is very, very unlikely they are the children of natives, many of whom would be unfamiliar with the idea of a “signing bonus”.
I would be reluctant to draw any conclusions about “zoomers” from this.
Whats going to stop UBI from subsidizing generations of welfare recipients growing exponentially?
I need not comment on your (MMT) approach to economics since there is honestly no common ground between those approaches with Austrian economics.
But
Do I need to say GDP is an accounting illusion that conflates the real economy with public spending?
We will, no matter what we do now, since the blunders of 2000/01 and 07/08. The fun thing about the Great Depression is that many conflicting economic theories can find validation of their preferred causes of the crisis, which would point to more fundamental causes such as capitalist structural issues. We will indeed go into the 2nd Great Depression but as Austrian economists sees it, it is a massive capital rebalancing if private economy and monetary regime is deregulated (but keep in mind von Mises chaired the body responsible for Austrian economic policy in 1934-38 and the country was the latest to recover from the slump). If we do, we will have a Weimar-style wipe-out of both savings and debt by hyperinflation.
But in fact, both of them aren’t the most accurate description of the current crisis. I’d say our collapse will look like Russia’s since it is a shift into a new economic system, a revolution of sorts like 1920s or 90s Russia where old economic relationships are to be liquidated (You will own nothing and be happy). You can’t apply regular capitalist or market economic theories on what is happening now, especially when many economic activities are restricted or quasi-outlawed.
(I replied thinking you don’t recognize this, but you half-do. But things need to normalize sooner or later, and at the end things will be radically different.)
I hear a lot of people have used whatever aid they got pay off outstanding loans and lines of credit. Even businesses took the chance to lean up and settle old debts.
Its like a “secret reset”.
Beginning of this summer there was a retarded demand on used cars, people spending money that would have been used abroad (which recycled some funds through tax revenue). And like good communists they base tax on the value from THEIR book, not on the actual transaction total.
Multiple neighbours seem to be doing extensive work (pools, interlock, etc.)
But fear not… all Western governments are importing all kinds of people like never before to fill all the vacant physical labour positions (through recruitment agencies of course, to avoid those benefits and unionization).
Ah the empire. Grind that meat.
Getting frugal is a good thing – it teaches them consumerism isn’t the end-all to their lives.
But taking the Hudson-pill, debt can simply be cancelled instead of inflationary money printing.
Low-paying physical labor isn’t necessary in the long-term, we have automation and then depopulation.
Most of the American Zoomers that I’ve met aren’t actually going to work, though. Money or no money. And that’s a good thing. Boomers need to have their small businesses destroyed.
I’m pro-labour in general, but the proliferation of these jobs that mostly exist through appeals to safetyism is not a good thing. It’s a classic unproductive bullshit job.
Great way to improve your gender diversity numbers for large construction firms though.
Boomer’s parents did it in 1965 when we were 5-20 years old. The greatest generation, so-called, opened every border for the democrat votes and to eliminate whites. Boomer sins included jew worship instead of jailing them all before they completed their grift.
So what will America have later on? Famines (it might be increasingly likely if Holodomor-like tactics are tried)
Small businesses contribute nothing to the USA. We don’t live off strawberries and overpriced consumer goods with a 5 day shipping standard.
Corporate America owns all the important (grain) farms, farm equipment, etc. They’re the good guys and the ones who kicked off the automation revolution. It’s small business owners who destroyed America. Those are the people we are looking to disenfranchise. Without them, this country will rapidly improve.
No collapse is coming. The US has already shifted to a new economic system that is invincible and world-dominating. It’s China, Russia, etc that are collapsing.
So, if working for Boomer’s businesses is somehow beneath the dignity of the Zoomer’s credo, why don’t they create their own? Someday, Mommy & Daddy’s money will run out and then what? The ones who weren’t lucky enough to live off of an inheritance can already be seen panhandling for their drug money on street corners…
But to be perfectly honest, I really couldn’t give a rip for these various miscreants and lazy bums. Plenty of Generation X & Yers still showing up to work where I live.
Both MMTers and Auctions would like for rates to rise. 🙂 MMT only cares about budget deficit, they don’t care how its done – tax cuts and high rates (saver income) work just fine for MMT. Austrians want high rates for other reasons.
I agree with both MMT and Austrian’s logic but i want low rates for other reasons. Savers don’t matter in modern world (as your 0.001% yield on savings account will tell you) and thus should not be a policy focus. Likewise, post 2008, I’m highly sceptical about the utility of interest rates as a tool for capital allocation purposes (Austrian thing). We all know how that ended.
I need low interest rates for selfish reason – low rates power industry and capital intensive projects. You can’t finance a $billion dollar factory with 30% interest rate and still stay in business. At 3%, easy. Which is why low interest rates are deflationary. You can take out loans and automate factories.
Also, strategically, commercial banking system is obsolete. They do more harm than good now. Low interest rates squeeze bank profits and make them less relevant and powerful. This prepares us well for more rational where demand is managed directly via Central Bank digital currencies and government treasuries. Commercial banking system is a pointless middleman that needs cutting out.
You are correct but it also drives investment which matters a great deal. Nobody wants to invest when GDP is tanking.
I agree with that. We are going into a brave new world, but there’s not much of an alternative to that. Income subsidy and aggregate demand management will address income inequality but wealth inequality will be an impossible to solve, at least not without destroying modern civilization.
So the best case scenario is most people living comfortably in pods and VR worlds and $trillionaires flying on their personal space stations. That’s the future but it beats all other alternatives.
LOL you are late. Both Chinese and even Russians now figured out how to print infinite money. The cat is out of the bag.
It also creates lots of sub-efficient decisions (what Austrians call “malinvestment”). It’s honestly a trade-off between quantity and quality of investment. You need to pick the balance somewhere.
What is actually deflationary is a drop in prices caused by reducing scarcity by increases in production (basically goods devaluing relative to money), and inflationism is the converse, no matter it is because of fiat running amok or real production collapsing.
The main reasons libertarians are against CBDC is because of the inevitability of micromanaging consumption, and the entire economy turning into a big plantation where everyone’s lifeline can be cut off if they revolt. If you remove the central banks from the picture, you can have cryptos and DeFi which will also kill TradFi if they aren’t suppressed.
Sure.
You’ve revealed your true colors but now, and if I’m more libertarian I’ll block you directly.
Instead of a Brave New World we can have Atlas Shrugged, and that is the biggest alternative out there. We also have the Revelations, since the elites (consciously or not) models some tech (patent 060606, QR codes) on the very last biblical imageries and you can tell it is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The 2 other cases could see the collapse of modern civilization, which is likely by now (Martin Armstrong says the WEF will fail and that brings us to a new period of heightened scarcity and a new economic paradigm as different from capitalism as capitalism was to early modern mercantilism)
Before the WEF can realize it, 1992 Russia will come to the US and EU, and most people will be disillusioned enough to “resist” such a future. They’ll instead turn to local economies and semi-primitive lifestyles. Transhumanists can still do their own thing since they are going to be supported by much automated production but they’ll be like only 25% of the world, and the rest going back to a level distributed from late 19th to late 20th century (by various fields of technological application). The WEF sees it coming and in fact actively encourages it (by inconveniencing and eventually shutting consumption option to the unvaccinated and anti-institutional types) to offload the burden on its new economic order.
And this is going to be beautiful – you can pick pods, VR worlds, a modest hut in your farm and among culture and tradition, only if you make the choice now.
They can’t do that. The world’s not going to accept that. Only countries that are intellectual and cultural powerhouses can do that. China and Russia wouldn’t even want to do that. They’re still in the heavy industry stage the USA left behind 50 years ago.
I forgot to add the best world we can get (from what is the trend) is a world where there is a power balance of the transhumanist Center and demodernized periphery. Kind of like late 19th century, but the urban/rural divide is sharp enough to merit the label of 2 civilizational stages.
This or something else will take hold, later in this century.
Balance is for cucks. You’re either getting online with the modern financial system and getting vaccinated, or you’re getting steamrolled.
It isn’t a problem in reality though. High profit opportunities will always get funded first. Low interest rates simply allow for more marginal projects to proceed, which is a good thing. There isn’t really a tradeoff, just an expansion of opportunities.
We live in on demand production world. You place an order, production occurs. You don’t, it won’t. Demand creates supply. Inflationism creates demand. No inflationism = no production. Inflationism = production.
Why micromanagement? Central Banks only care about aggregate, they don’t care about what you spend on. Unlike Bank of America that will cancel your credit card if you are not woke enough. Private sector finance is far more micromanaging compared to Central Banks.
You mean Bitcoin that’s fluctuating like +/- 50% daily? Good luck with that. I’m all for digital currency, but you need predictability to run economy, and Central Banks are better positioned for that, I think. I’m not entirely discounting private sector though, maybe they can make it work, who knows. But I’m skeptical.
Alas Shrugged doesn’t work in automated economy where 80% of GDP is services. Robots won’t go Galt and if some piece of garbage lawyer or bankster wants to do it, good riddance, no shortage of you around. Please take your worthless friends with you too.
Maybe but unlikely and hopefully not. We have been doing pretty good so far.
Only cucks care about the world.
I wouldn’t exactly call worshipping black cross dressers “an intellectual and cultural powerhouse”.
Both countries have highly developed IT ecosystem, they make self driving electric vehicles and all the latest buzz tech. So it’s not just heavy industry anymore.
There are stablecoins.
Stablecoins are never more stable than the fiat currency they shadow. They aren’t inflation-proof.
IS this anything like those, “our vassals in Afghanistan will never collapse” kind of statements?
If…just if, they don’t collapse (an interesting claim on your part, considering their economies aren’t based on the world continuing to use the dollar), what will you do?
I was saying a truly free economy in the sense that “people are no longer under pressure”, not the libertarian stereotype.
While I’m all for UBI, sensible protectionist policies\subsidies (but not corn), sensible regulation (no plastic in our pigs, etc.) with with sensible deregulation (hair cutters don’t need to go to beauty school to get a license), and abolishing property taxes on primary residencies, quite a few of these don’t seem so bad.
Our medical field does need reform or collapse.
“Key research and defense industries” can be supported for obvious reasons, but I would rather everyone involved be executed and fired, in that order, before giving any of them military contracts without some reforms as well.
Basically, be sensible and good, instead of shoveling money and support into what is clearly an affront to God in the quality of goods it puts out (like fat people.)
Nothing at all.
UBI is just a way to cut the welfare budget by removing any bureaucracy (my favorite part) involved in welfare (everyone gets a cut) and also simplify it (one flat payment, use it well or die), while sharing the fiat-wealth and neutering abusive power structures. If fiat ever ends, we just adjust payments to a sustainable level.
If I had to add anything, I would say only adults get it. Not children. Meaning no child payments or bonuses for children through it. The only people getting paid to have kids better be quality types.
If Latrica or my 3rd cousin want 6 kids by 6 different men, they can have them, but there is no extra money for them. Hopefully selfishness combined with a Singapore-style “paid voluntary sterilization program” help out with that. I’m not really for sterilization, but I’m okay making it an option.
No. Central planning is precisely what makes a powerful and functional economy. It gives a ‘goal’ for the economy to move towards. A bunch of people doing many things at once is unproductive and a waste of resources. ALL states that produced ‘economic miracles’ from the US, to the USSR, to Japan, South Korea and China used Central Planning. “Free market” only works when there is a certain baseline established. Removing government functions and putting it into the hands of the ‘free market’ is only a recipe for disaster.
You’re probably underestimating the willingness of people to leave the whole institution that will rise even further in due time. It’s ideological reaction and shift.
And probably you don’t take into account the possibility of collapse in the transhumanist sectors (either fucking up themselves or being genocided from without) which people insulated from them can avoid.
You are going to have coercion, whether private or state. It is built into modern economic systems.
They will collapse before meaningful reforms can be done, in the most Randian ways possible.
UBI is massive wealth redistribution and you know that. It’s appropriating money from productive sectors (whether automated or not) and it isn’t really sustainable in the long-term, probably collapsing in a Randian way too.
I’m thinking of the dignity angle where the poor will preserve their own and not receiving them even if they can help financially, because stay out of dependence is a bigger goal.
Once you have voluntary sterilization you will also have the possibility of mandatory sterilization if the state wants.
I’ll see it the other way and say any form of economic planning need to be built on the base of prior market economies, no matter how free the markets are. Markets are largely organic, plans are largely artificial.
Some planning is good if you have the culture and ideology to go for it. But a command economy eventually run aground like in the Soviet Union. A problem of extent.
“ Small businesses contribute nothing to the USA.”
Diluting corporate concentration of power and the concomitant creation of fake public moralizing campaigns is nothing?
Why would they leave? What would they do? Do you seriously believe that, say, Director of Research at Pfizer would leave his job, and all that status and prestige that it grants him, to raise pigs on a farm?
And why? His taxes won’t be affected. All because Shaniqua in the ghetto managed to purchase a new fridge with her $3,000/mo income subsidy? Why would Pfizer researchers care?
Shaniqua will not want to work, but that’s a good thing – we don’t want IQ 80 people being placed in positions of responsibility. They will just blow up all the factories. All we want from Shaniqua is to buy fridges, create demand, and clear those warehouses. And be happy of course. Why not?
Actual civilization critical people will continue to work as normal – the status and just job interest will drive them in addition to income significantly above subsidy.
I’m not saying people in significant positions will leave (tho that isn’t out of the question like say, R&D people jumping ship to Gab). I’m saying the huddled UBI-receiving masses.
Shaniqua will look at his/her/their humble abode, and then the fields out there, and wonder what he/she/they have been doing with all those free time and dependence. People need a meaning in their lives to live, and outside of hedonists/libertines just eating, sleeping and being merry in an enclosure aren’t even passable ones. Heck, if we truly think so, we don’t need to go on unz.com and spat on each other virtually.
Those people living in the field at least will have dignity and connection back to human nature, and maybe freedom.
(and I haven’t started talking about the wholr agenda being botched midway because of organized resistance that has been building up the last 1 1/2 years, because our world is run on Randian logic now)
Yes, my goal is to simply minimize that coercion.
If it collapses, then good. I’m just pushing reform while it hasn’t yet.
It is, you are correct. We already live in a redistributionist society, and that will not change unless the economy completely implodes and tens of millions die. If that happens, that’s fine. So again, I’m finding a way to make this distributionist system more efficient and egalitarian. If the government can summon two trillion dollars, it can give people a monthly payment. The day it can’t, we can celebrate while we figure out a new tax-schema. If it helps, I would wed this to abolishing property taxes on primary residencies.
Yes, but see, we already have it and have done it. I’m just offering money for it now.
Extremely important economic insight.
This was the key to America’s extremely high per capita income during frontier times (1607 – late 19th century) and again during the immigration-restriction period 1924-1965.
With a chronic labor shortage, joke jobs didn’t exist and there was maximum incentive to invest in or invent labor-saving devices.
Even in 1750, despite parliament’s legislative dis-incentives to industrialization in the colonies, America had more steam engines per capita than any other country. What little industry existed was maximally efficient.
It was the opposite of Mark Elvin’s “high level equilibrium trap” which caused late-medieval/early-modern China to de-industrialize, because it was cheaper to hire peasants to grind grain by hand than to maintain machinery.
Shaniqua will have all the time in the world to find meaning in her life. We just require she buys refrigerators or whatever while she does that. What she does after a mandatory shopping spree is entirely up to her.
The WEF wants billions to eventually die.
What kind of economic system and society we have isn’t the biggest problem, even tho each system has its good and bad points. Who runs the show is.
I agree with that.
The point remains, I want to reform this system anyway. We can deal with the scripted genocides/unscripted catastrophes as they come.
Even tho I’ve said those at the core of power and influence is the issue, that is quite superficial – I made a bad statement here by singling out the elites. Actually both the systems and its subjects (no matter the position they occupy) feed on each other. Both will commit suicide and go.
This too is probably true.
While we wait to see if Atlantis will sink or is already sinking, one might as well try to make things better. Of course, many are those who believe the current system is infallible, immortal and omnipotent.