Comments on: The New Class

By: ER

ER — Sun, 29 Nov 2015 03:29:29 +0000

Tom, you are so predictable.

Now, Are you going to treat me to another lecture about the Gulag, or Pol Pot’s killing fields? You know, the inevitable result of socialized medicine.

By: TB

TB — Sun, 29 Nov 2015 03:01:16 +0000

Of which there are none on this board. I’ve pointed that out before.

By: ER

ER — Sun, 29 Nov 2015 02:40:02 +0000

Now you know where I go when I’m Up the Line.

By: Jody

Jody — Sun, 29 Nov 2015 02:25:27 +0000

First thing that came to mind upon reading this.

By: ER

ER — Sat, 28 Nov 2015 22:23:43 +0000

can never actually point to a time in history when it has actually existed. Sure they can come up with
gruesome 20th century examples of Communism, but have they anything to contrast it with? The Satanic Mills of the Gilded Age? The genteel slave plantations of the Antebellum South? Post-colonial America, with its suffrage limited to white, male, European Gentlemen of Property and their economy dominated by indentured servants and forced African Labor?

Did the Romans have it? The Greeks? Any of the Empires of Antiquity? The Merchant Adventurers of Elizabethan England or the Dutch Republic of the 1600s? No, they didn’t even have Capitalism as we know it. They had Mercantilism. Capitalism didn’t really exist in any remotely recognizable form until T. Roosevelt busted the Trusts, the Union movement took hold and FDR initiated the New Deal. It wasn’t until then that it really started working for the rest of us.

“Now if Jill opens a sidewalk lemonade stand and Jack across the street opens one and charges a penny less per glass…”

Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

By: Robert

Robert — Sat, 28 Nov 2015 21:34:20 +0000

Don’t quite remember where, but in the last week I came across a report of some archaeological work suggesting that rising sea levels around 3500 BCE (one of those little warmings I think) flooded the lower plains of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, that area that today is the marshland of southern Iraq. And that the flooding herded people on to smaller patches of higher and drier ground, greatly increasing population density, and forcing people to cope by developing the first examples of government and infrastructure.

Conversely, the experience of America, starting as a few jumped-up colonies perched on the edge of a vast wilderness, showed lack of a boundary–the safety valve–lessened the desire for government. Until we filled up the continent, and natural and political boundaries started compressing the population. Then we started finding more government desirable and necessary. (Sure there’s a political lesson there.) It’s no coincidence that a lot of the people who today rail against government romanticize the Old West and the supposed freedom of cowboys on the open range (where they clivenbundied a living for “free”).

Thomas Piketty, in “Wealth in the 21st Century”, took note of the changing nature of wealth, that as you note, it depends less today on property, and a lot of it comes from the extremely high salaries of CEOs, entertainers, athlete-entertainers, and Wall Street paper shufflers. But there’s a deadly catch: Without high inheritance tax rates, those high salaries get turned into dynastic wealth, which starts owning everything and creating a new aristocracy. All over again, because that’s how it works. We always come to grief when we forget (or are persuaded to forget) how unrestrained capitalism works.

By: mcfly

mcfly — Sat, 28 Nov 2015 17:42:28 +0000

Much food for thought. Thanks ER.