You have been found guilty of the crime of being obsolete.
Posted on 07/30/2010 9:48:37 PM PDT by Pride_of_the_Bluegrass
Have the American people outlived their usefulness to the rich minority in the United States? A number of trends suggest that the answer may be yes.
In every industrial democracy since the end of World War II, there has been a social contract between the few and the many. In return for receiving a disproportionate amount of the gains from economic growth in a capitalist economy, the rich paid a disproportionate percentage of the taxes needed for public goods and a safety net for the majority.
In North America and Europe, the economic elite agreed to this bargain because they needed ordinary people as consumers and soldiers. Without mass consumption, the factories in which the rich invested would grind to a halt. Without universal conscription in the world wars, and selective conscription during the Cold War, the U.S. and its allies might have failed to defeat totalitarian empires that would have created a world order hostile to a market economy.
Globalization has eliminated the first reason for the rich to continue supporting this bargain at the nation-state level, while the privatization of the military threatens the other rationale.
The offshoring of industrial production means that many American investors and corporate managers no longer need an American workforce in order to prosper. They can enjoy their stream of profits from factories in China while shutting down factories in the U.S. And if Chinese workers have the impertinence to demand higher wages, American corporations can find low-wage labor in other countries
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
Golly Moses. “The Rise of the Machines” is a true story.
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It can only happen by evil and corruption being rampant in government.
And it has happened, see book: “The Franklin Coverup” if you doubt. JMHO
Congress is so I guess we are.
Americans gave away their liberty for a TV clicker. They are too lazy to cancel cable and sat TV to cut off the elites power. Enjoy serfdom.
Interesting article that gets one thing wrong, they cannot stay rich if the US Middle Class disapears. The markets in China and India will collapse if that happens. Their prosperity is based on our consumption. And they are also very protective of their markets. Look at mobile phones.
19th century view of the world in which everyone is either a “rich” Robber Baron capitalist or a “worker” in some grimy factory living hand-to-mouth.
The US economy could compete in the world and provide opportunity for its people if the liberals would stop strangling it to death.
Government, at all levels, sucks up 45% of GDP.
The liberals demand that we pay $400 billion every year to foreign countries for energy, instead of using nuclear power and domestic oil & gas and coal. This is draining us of our national wealth.
They have imported 30+ million low-skilled, low-educated foreign nationals costing us more than $100 billion a year, tens of billion in outbound remittances, and pulling down wages for Americans by uncountable billions of dollars.
Unions, backed by the power of the government, demand levels of benefits that bankrupt their companies, and then get the federal government to cover it over with taxpayer money.
Taxes crush American businesses, and then the federal government complains that they aren’t hiring more workers. Just the cost of complying with the tax code wastes billions and billions of dollars.
Regulations hamstring businesses and smother the native spirit of invention and entrepreneurship that once made America the most prosperous land in the world.
It is the liberals who are crushing America’s economy.
But if they can successfully demonize businessmen as “Robber Barons,” perhaps they can convince Americans to hand over that final measure of total power to the government - and end liberty and prosperity forever.
OOPS I meant disappears.
This is the kind of thinking you’d expect from the Left: inane questions as to whether entire societies are ‘obsolete’. Makes the Socialist history of genocide more explicable.
There is no such thing as “American Corporations”, Corporations have no nation.
Arthur Jensen said it best in the movie, “Network”:
“You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.”
Are Americans not Leftist enough for our taste?
The Left, who has always wanted a socialist America, realized that the present population was too resistant, so they are in the process of flooding the country with 3rd world peoples who’s native countries are socialist based and who are much more eccepting of Socialism...and voilà!...The Socialist States of America.
Thank you.
Lefties think they can just keep taking more and more of productive peoples earnings without significant consequence to wealth production.
The fact is they’ve exceeded tipping point with the yoke around the neck of everyone willing to work between taxes, regulation, endless environmental insanity and not in my backyard.
We were a “can do” people.
Not anymore.
“Americans gave away their liberty for a TV clicker.”
Duntno if they gave it away as much as it was taken while they were distracted by shiny objects.
WTF?
Girbilists are certainly obsolete.
And it is increasingly becoming evident to the most PollyAnna-ish among them that the days of being able to earn a living at it are very numbered for the vast majority of them.
The world, it seems, doesn’t want a gate keeper after all.
Misery loves company.
“19th century view of the world in which everyone is either a “rich” Robber Baron capitalist or a “worker” in some grimy factory living hand-to-mouth”
You’re absolutely right. This is a pathetic article by someone with a Political Science 101 insight worthy of Barak Obama. The world he’s talking about ended in the 70’s when the smoke stack industry coalition of decadent “economic elites” and the old Labor unions could no longer compete with the Japanese auto industry, and the American steel industry fell behind Japan and much of Europe technologically.
The next industrial revolution started in California of all places, with the invention of the microprocessor in the early 70’, followed by the development of personal computers, and the biotech industry in the 80’s. These industries catapulted the US way ahead of that of a resurgent Europe by the 1980’s.
Why we couldn’t sustain our techological preeminence and are now facing an economic decline that lead is a complex issue. But I think it has a lot to do with our silly educational system and general cultural decline along with the debilitating factors you discussed.
One thing is for sure. Our decline has nothing to do with “Robber Barons” of the kind that produced greatest transformation living standards in human history more the than 100 years ago and almost did it again 30 years ago.
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