@RealUn
Wallstreet is the biggest obstacle inside of the United States from where all of our government problems politically derives, for the American people to be truly free the stranglehold of Wallstreet needs to be destroyed forever.
Libertarians and capitalist republicans have shown only incompetence or ineptitude in meeting that obstacle. Only a socialist or communist solution is left as options.
While socialism or communism both are not strong enough in this nation yet overtime they will be as the superwealthy and capitalists wage economic warfare on the national population domestically. Things have gotten significantly worse in the last twenty years and my guess in the next ten years or less that will be even more true yet.
@pseudoai
The biggest problem inside the United States isn’t just the whole economic system, it is also the national currency itself through several decades of devaluation. Inflation is horrible here and the currency itself has lost a lot of its monetary value overtime.
There doesn’t just need to be a political economic revolution in this nation but there also needs to be a currency monetary one as well.
The federal government under its so called economic capitalism through endless debt, inflation, and currency devaluation has eroded a majority of the purchasing power that is the dollar. It’s amazing how these assholes who call themselves professionals of business or finance have done so badly with our currency, national economy, and over all market economic system.
While this nation was bailing out the rich or the wealthy constantly the average citizens just constantly sink into the despair of poverty through multitudes of several decades.
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Yeah yeah, and what would you keep of capitalism and how do you see how would it become better?
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@pseudoai
I would certainly get rid of many things our current economic framework of capitalism has today starting with the dominating influence the superwealthy has on our government now.
This period of gross deregulation has been a complete disaster.
I would also clamp down on landlords because this rental economy takes away from the productive working class.
Price and rent controls would be a good start, but I wouldn’t stop just there overall.
Yeah yeah, and what would you keep and make stronger by making it better?
What if price controls seem like a good idea at first but gives bad consequences? Do you know a place where that experiment has been run for enough time and it has had good consequences? And what is the percentage of that over all places that had price controls?
One thing: I completely and wholeheartedly agree that you and people who think like you can make a community inside any country and, inside that community, fix the prices between themselves and such! That will absolutely work great - in fact, it’s quite like making another family. Just that you can’t impose that and its consequences over people that disagree with that. It doesn’t work for that ‘commune’ or ‘family’ (or you have to kick them out), nor for the common good
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@pseudoai
We can keep doing nothing in the name of the so called free market because that has worked out so well for us almost the last thirty years.
You have stagnant wages for the working class that nobody wants to raise in any significant manner while a majority of it gets eaten up by inflation.
You have rents that have skyrocketed the last thirty years with those wages remaining stagnant where more and more people are being pushed into the streets homeless.
Then to top it all off you have huge price hikes on virtually everything that those stagnant wages for the working class cannot even afford anything making the prospects for overall economic consumption look very grim.
Your do nothing approach isn’t working. At some point market intervention and regulation is going to have to make a comeback otherwise it’s just going to be a steady grind into the collapse of virtually everything.
Yeah, for sure, but what would you keep and what would you incrementally make better?
Me doing or not doing has nothing to do with the topic, and keep in mind that many times ‘doing something’ just because of doing makes it worse. It’s not enough ‘I’m doing something’ to justify it
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Well to be honest, the solution that would work the best is to unwind the last 30 years. Almost everything since NAFTA should be reversed. Including to get the national debt under control, which can be done with a combination of reducing government spending and adding a new tax to pay down the existing debt slowly over time.
As for rent controls and other price controls, these have the negative side effect of reducing supply leading to massive shortages. If a property owner is used to charging $2000 a month per unit for rent, and he is making 5% profits on that annually, do you really think he is going to keep renting if he is forced to reduce rent by even just 5%, let alone more? Even if you ONLY force him to reduce rent to $1900 per month and hold it there with no increases, he is no longer making money. Therefore it is not in his interest to keep renting the property and he will sell it to someone else.
Maybe that new person will have innovations and better ways to reduce costs. Then again, maybe not.
The sad thing is how any significant price control will only cause severe supply shortages. Look what happened when they tried price controls on gasoline in the 1970s. Very long lines just to get gas in your car. And some gas stations wouldn’t even have any gas. Not good.
I don’t have a solution, but I know what doesn’t work.
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@pseudoai
“Doing something just makes it worse.”
What do you think doing nothing is going to accomplish?
@ProfessorX
Certainly abolishing things like NAFTA would be a good start bringing industry, commerce, and manufacturing back to the United States.
I am all for that as those international moves by corporations should of never existed to begin with as it only harms the American working class.
But the problem with all of that is a couple of things. One is that you’re going to run into those hardcore global international capitalists who are going to tell you that you have no business telling them where they can build and operate their plants, warehouses, or factories at where telling them what to do is akin to communism. They’ll say the same thing about the workers where if you tell them that they should make a preference for American workers over Mexican, Indian, Korean, Taiwanese, or ect.
The next problem you’re going to run into with that is so much of these jobs, occupations, and modern careers revolve around a lot of high degree of training along with education.
To retrain the American workforce you’re going to have to make higher education and on the job training universal for all workers. Again, you’ll be accused of being a Marxist and a communist for suggesting such.
Throughout my life I became so accustomed of being accused of being a Marxist and communist that at some point I just owned it saying to myself, “Okay, I guess I really am one.”
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@ProfessorX
At this point in time within the United States landowners and renting landlords is where most of the wealth is concentrated.
Now if we look at economic capitalism a lot of the money generation revolves around consumption and consumerism, it’s suppose to anyways. Without general consumption or consumerism your economic capitalism collapses completely.
If workers are spending 60-65% of their money on rent that doesn’t leave much room for consumption or consumerism, does it?
Keep in mind that rents has only steadily increased within the last thirty years.
At some point this monopoly and stranglehold by landlords is going to have to be challenged along with being broken up otherwise workers are not going to be able to financially afford much of anything. If workers and people stop spending their money on things within general consumption or consumerism your national economy entirely collapses.
@ProfessorX
The solution is to make things affordable for the majority of the population once again, but that requires these international capitalists, industrialists, and corporate tycoons to be constantly challenged.
Republicans, libertarians, and business worshipping neoconservatives don’t do that exactly, do they?
Making things like rent cheaper is a complicated thing. It can be done but you need to tackle system-wide problems, like inflation. Just telling the rich owners to “charge less rent” isn’t going to work, because prices and costs all across the economy are increasing.
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If you want to impose meaningful rent price controls then I can guarantee you the number of homeless people will skyrocket. But then you use government money to build government apartments. Even if these are subsidized by the government i.e. operated at a loss. So there are various ways to look at it.
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A better way to make rent more affordable would be to give the people back more of their own money: reduce their taxes and increase their wages 
and bring inflation back down. There, problem solved 
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@ProfessorX
Do you know how many houses have remained empty throughout the United States because nobody can financially afford to buy them? The opposite becomes a problem as well.
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True, this modern hyper-financialized kind of capitalism is very bad at price discovery. Inflation is just one part of that, massive bubbles are another. Like the housing bubble and credit bubble that finally burst. Manipulating prices outside of natural supply and demand is always risky. Especially when those in charge are morons, like today.
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@ProfessorX
The problem with that is an out of control federal government that spends infinite amount sums of money on the military and other state projects where it has to get that money from somewhere through taxation.
In order to cut taxes all across the board you would need to have the political will to get the government to stop spending money overall. This has been ongoing problem within the United States for a very long time now where every single year gets worse.
@ProfessorX
When you approach these business owners or capitalists demanding raised wages for the working class they’re just going to call you a Marxist or a commie no matter what.
As a communist myself I have no problem with that, but for the rest of you politically…
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I stopped caring whatever names people called me long ago. Facts and results are what matter.
Government is the only thing that can stand up for the people against tyrannical capitalism. In this, communism is correct. So the political will is needed to USE the government for what it was intended to be used: to combat crime, fraud, tyranny, theft, murder all on behalf of the people. If rich capitalists are getting away with all that, and they are, then government should step in and stop it. Otherwise we simply live in a mafia mob rule society (oh wait, that’s basically what end stage capitalism is already).
This is what conservatives and libertarians really misunderstand: we NEED a strong government, one with great power, yet that power must be directed AT threats and AWAY from the people. Unfortunately today it is the opposite, the government’s power ignores real threats while harming the people. This is because the government really does not exist anymore other than in the very minimal technical sense. Democracy has not existed here for some time, and even the functions of the government and the laws are subverted so consistently it would be incorrect to see the state as a coherent or functional entity.
Instead I think we have oligarchy masquerading as political government. Politicians are paid stooges bribed or threatened to keep up the charade for the masses, meanwhile real government, real politics died long ago. This is why the capitalists are able to get away with so much, the only thing standing in their way are other capitalists (yes they do in-fight a lot but the bigger fish end up winning in the long run) and the people. Yet without true government and politics the people have no real power to defend themselves. The capitalists know this, hence why they targeted the politicians and institutions of government long ago, corrupting these from within and replacing them with regulatory capture and puppet front-men who are often enough actual actors (like Trump). They think it is funny to rub our noses in it. Since most people do not care anyway, they cannot handle the negative emotions and cognitive dissonance of these truths so prefer to live in a cozy bubble with their head up their ass forever. Libs or conservatives, doesn’t matter, they all do it for the most part.
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