Posted on 09/18/2017 10:39:00 AM PDT by re_tail20
A warning to my friends on the political right: Economic inequality is real. And the blowback from it could blindside us and cause a seismic leap to the left from which we may not return.
Or let me try it another way. We’re all feeling it: a political tribalism rippling through the country. People are not talking, but rather yelling past each other. Tensions are rising. Scapegoating has become the rage: Mexicans are taking our jobs, big banks control the system, Trump is causing hurricanes, neo-Nazis say it’s the Jews, Black Lives Matter say it’s the cops
There is a root cause for this polarization. And no, it’s not racism, Obamacare or Trump. It’s economic stagnation. People are not getting ahead, and we feel it in our bones. Economic opportunity is passing us by. It scares us to the core. It makes us act out. It turns us into victims in search of the right oppressor to blame...
(Excerpt) Read more at i2i.org ...
Economic inequality has been a fact of life since the beginning if time.
Get used to it.
Next up: Intellectual inequality will be the next crisis.
Stupid people will demand that smart people get lobotomized so the stupid people can compete for high paying jobs.
Every system has income inequality. That is inherent in any system which accepts the reality of Supply and Demand, where supply is not infinite.
The only system that escapes this is Utopian Communism. Which is an ideal state that can never be reached, but violent totalitarian regimes of Looters keep trying.
The War on Poverty is over.
Poverty won.
The free market establishes the value of every kind of work. Don’t like what you are paid? Pick a line of work that is more valuable.
If you cannot perform well at a higher paying line of work, then just accept that life is not fair and move on.
The problem is Ambition Inequality.
Some people want to make a positive contribution to humanity, others want to just sit around and get high all day.
Economic inequality is real.
I can’t believe someone calling themselves the Independence Institute could be so ignorant.
If the left wants a real discussion, this way of thinking has to be included.
What you say is now BS. The Cheap Labor Express floods the market at all wage/employment strata: from bus boy to software engineer. Workers now have to compete with imported labor from all over the world. That is not what is supposed to happen.
Our country got rich rebuilding the world after WWII. We’ve been living off the credit card we acquired back then ever since. It can’t continue. Eventually our debt service will be higher than the payments on the debt. Once we reach the cliff, the fall will be fast and devastating.
Two things. One is funny. Both are instructive:
https://grandpappy.org/eonehou2.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlN28DoL5qA
“Economic inequality” along with racial or gender inequality is not something the Constitution has delegated to the feds.The Constitution gives the feds NO authority to interfere in these economic/social matters. And the facts is, the more the feds meddle in these things the worse these things get.
“ECONOMIC INEQUALITY” IS NONE OF THE FEDS LEGAL BUSINESS.
What’s the answer? As always it is FREEDOM!!! The answer to “economic inequality” is the free market economy which provides maximum opportunity and upward mobility from a lower economic class to a higher. THAT is the story of America. NOT GOVERNMENT - FREEDOM!!!!.
The poor? The needy? The homeless? The starving?
Screw them. Their economic status is secondary.
Hurting the rich is what matters. That’s how to make things better. Raising the quality of life for the poor is unacceptable if it increases inequality (i.e. if someone gets rich)
/sarc
I just finished studying the French Revolution.
France seriously tried flattening out “economic inequality”. I mean they really tried hard at it, exactly the way modern Leftists want to - to the point that the term “Left” (as in political stance) originated there. After several bloody years (during which Leftist leaders progressively lost their heads, literally, for not being Leftist enough), all that economic inequality pretty much came back about the same way that it had been at start.
The guy with the worst idea gets paid a lot of money and the guy with the best idea gets none. Or they both get the same.
Is that what they are talking about?
That’s progress, baby!
inequality has been a fact of life. True. But...
Work hard, play by the rules and achieve upward mobility used to work and no longer seems to.
While Socialists were denouncing Capitalists and Capitalists were denouncing Socialists, the Corporatists, the arch-enemies of Capitalism gained control of the swamp and control of most everything.
Tax policy, regulation, subsidies, etc are not socialist pipe-dreams to help the poor... they are welfare to the corporations, to the Solyndras, to Elon Musk, to United Health Care and big hospital corporations and big IT corporations.
While Socialists and Capitalists were destroying each other, Corporatists grabbed the power and money.
I read the article to be sure I know where the author is coming from, and while I don’t disagree with his fundamental premise that economic stagnation is the problem and decreasing taxes and reducing legislative barnacles on the ship of industry are the solution, I don’t like the way he presents it.
My major issue here is that he focuses this on “Economic Inequality”.
Economic Inequality? There has always been, and always will be “Economic Inequality”, and that has nothing whatsoever to to with the issue.
What I feel he is doing is conflating “Economic Inequality” which is a fact (and always will be a fact) with what the Social Justice Warriors call “Economic Injustice” which is the inherent “unfairness” that some people make more than others, and which is a completely Marxist construct.
These two are quite different things. I think the author makes a mistake by opening his article with “...A warning to my friends on the political right: Economic inequality is real...” because at that point, ignorant people are going to go right to that and read it as: “...A warning to my friends on the political right: Economic injustice is real.”
Economic Injustice is NOT real. It is a Marxist construct, which states that everyone is entitled to the same income. His warning to “friends on the political right” efficiently makes the conflation automatic. No “friends on the political right” who have a brain would say that economic inequality is not real, because it IS.
But they would argue correctly that “Economic Injustice” is a Marxist scam (as is all Marxism) because we have equality of opportunity, not “equality of income”. Two different people may have the same opportunity to create a business, but to guarantee that if they both work just as hard, that they will have the same outcome?
Some Social Justice Warriors or Marxists don’t get to decide what is just and what is not in an outcome. The market decides.
Very true, but economic OPPORTUNITY can be improved if the congress would do something about tax reform. Businesses could be incentivized to expand and individuals could keep more of their money and spend it on productive things that help the economy instead of feeding the political monster in Washington.
Correct. I believe the problems the author refers to are more caused by the destruction of the middle class which we have been seeing over the last 10 years.
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