Tuesday, April 3, 2018

Trying To Make A Broken System Do What It Wasn't Designed For Is A Big Mistake

You can certainly understand the usual Liberal tendency towards wanting to make a system that isn't working very well better. And Liberals have been trying for decades now to make our economic system work better; not only in terms of a better deal, across the boards, in terms of an actual improvement in equality of outcomes, but in trying to have jubs be available to all folks ready to work.

The problem is that this complicated system, that has gotten a lot more complicated precisely because of the efforts to control it from the outside with laws, simply does not want there to be this kind of equality, because the truth of the matter is that it is supposed to be a system based on what was the starting assumption of the time of its creation: That we will always be faced with a natural form of scarcity so we must organize around how to best allocate scarce resources, and skilled labor. And that worked fairly well for a while.

But this system was also a great instigator of change, and change did indeed happen; most especially in our abilities to understand, and effect nature. Which is just another way of saying we acquired a great increase in instrumentality with which to do both understanding better, and effecting better. And this would inevitably lead to ever more stunning technical achievements, from repeatable type, to optics, to harnessing electrons, and ultimately the atom itself. And now we don't have to carry forward the old thinking of scarcity as we used to, encrusted so deeply into the very DNA of an old economic operating system. But certain elements in our society have become accustomed to these old arrangements and are loath to part with them now, for it has given them great privilege the rest of us do not have. But a lot of us still think that, just by changing a law here, and there, that we can give this old tiger a new way of thinking. But that notion must be seen as the folly decades of trying, and failing, have shown it to be.

It simply can't be done. Capitalism is broken. It can't be fixed. Accept that. The sooner you do the sooner we can get to doing the things we need to do to fix this planet.

FULL EMPLOYMENT


A job guarantee — the idea that everyone should have a job if they want or need one, and it’s the government’s job to make that possible — is back.





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