The Parasites and the Have-Nots

americanthinker ^ | 8/21/2022 | Alexsandar Markovic

[bitt]

Frederick Taylor's "scientific management" was all the rage when fascism and totalitarianism was on the rise in the 1920s–30s. It sounded good — people with pertinent knowledge and skills would occupy positions in logically designed organizations in which those qualities would be optimally employed.

In practice, the most common quality of scientifically managed firms was intense dissatisfaction among their workers. That's mostly because, in reality, people's family, political connections, and willingness to "play ball" with the powerful and wealthy overshadowed everything else when it came to filling positions. That's why the purest expressions of scientific management — communist countries — failed and continue to fail so spectacularly on all metrics of popular well-being and welfare.

America's founders recognized that human nature predisposed people to abuse power to serve their own interests, and designed checks and balances into our government to make such abuse difficult. In the 233 years since we ratified the Constitution, those interested in subverting it have made substantial progress.

In communist societies, people in power act to preserve their best interest and the interests those closest to them, which screws everybody else and gives rise to a bifurcated society of "haves" and "have-nots." This happens every time socialism/communism is implemented — without exception. It ultimately led to the deaths of over 100 million people in the 20th century alone. We're seeing the same trends in our country simply because power-holders here have surreptitiously implemented some of the defining characteristics of those collective societies.

[bitt]

p

[Blood of Tyrants]

[jimpick]

We used to be able to support a family on one income. Now it takes two so one can pay just taxes while the other barely makes enough to pay the bills.

It is disgusting how the government passes a bill that we pay for, and they get away with insider trading on that bill. But hey it is not against the law when you write the law right. Then there are the kickbacks they get for their elections. Or the sweetheart deals on land like Obama got.

[Secret Agent Man]

And now its like all the taxes either go to huge corporations with govt contracts, liberal activist groups and companies, and illegals. Our own citizens are homeless in tent cities as the govt destroys their country by covid bs, killed hundreds of thousands of businesses and other barely hanging on, hiring more harassing tax agents and murdered hundreds of thousands bytheir two bioweapons they unleashed with the help of usa deep state working with china.

[Vermont Lt]

Frederick Taylor wasn’t a communist.

Scientific Management was a cornerstone of the industrial revolution, and it continues to this day. Without it we would be living in an agrarian shit hole.

Just because people misuse tools doesn’t make the person who developed them guilty.

[ProgressingAmerica]

Hardly.

When progressivism was so totally and utterly devastated in 1920(after they completely frightened everybody in the 1910s) the progressives went searching for a new word to cloak themselves.

They knew that forever, they could never use the word “progressivism” again to describe themselves. The problem is that “scientific management” is too big of a mouthful, and there wasn’t a lock-step effort by all progressives everywhere to use that one single phrase. Even to this day the leftover Wilsonians/Rooseveltians are timid about coming back to the word “progressive”. They still in some quarters want to hide from it. The sting from over 100 years ago is that bad.

It wasn’t until 1933 that they took over the word “liberal” like a home squatter. When the progressives took over the word “liberal”, there was a complete and unitary, unbreakable focus. One side of progressivism to the other was determined to take that word.

And take it they did.

[aquila48]

“This has been the case since World War 2, which was the event that precipitated the metastatic expansion of our federal bureaucracy.”

No, it’s been the case since 1913 when the 16th amendment - income tax - allowed the federal government to help itself to whatever it wants from your paycheck.

To me that’s by far the worst thing that ever happened to this country. It’s the reason why the federal government has become so gargantuan and intimidating.

Not only can they take whatever they want of your earnings they can find out every minute detail of your life.

And it’s only going to get worse with the addition of 87000 brown shirts.

[rlmorel]

The manipulation of language and symbols by the Left is not, and has never been an accident.

We have made a mistake ceding that territory to them over the years, until today, it is nearly wholly owned by the Left.

Media. Education. Entertainment. Government.

They have controlled the language and symbols for a long time.

Funny.

As I wrote this, it occurred to me that the problem is, in the long term, that raw revision of language doesn’t work in an Internet based environment. But I don’t even think a half a second passed before I corrected myself and thought that, oh yes it does, with the help of Big Tech.

In the end, I don’t think the efforts to attack the perception of reality (via language and symbols) and the assault on freedom of speech (and thought) will win.

We may go though terrible times in the next century as the forces of tyranny and freedom strive to gain an upper hand, I I believe that there are going to be times when the fight against censorship and tyranny will appear irretrievably lost, but...in the long run, I believe we will win out.

[x]

There was a massive reaction against Woodrow Wilson and his war. The 1920 election was a major landslide. Still, LaFollette ran on his own Progressive ticket in 1924. There were still politicians and voters who called themselves progressives.

It was the Manhattan avant-garde, the writers at the New Republic and other intellectual types, who took over the liberal label. They wanted to distinguish themselves from the Midwestern progressives, who they saw as censorious and puritanical. The new "liberals" wanted a less moralistic politics and country. This was the beginning, perhaps, of "lifestyle liberalism." It helped that the country imposed Prohibition at the time.

FDR was a New Republic reader and he brought many of those people into politics. If "progressive" still has a bad smell from the past, one reason is that the Communists took over the label. The word had Communist associations from the Thirties into the Eighties. Henry Wallace, one of FDR's vice presidents, created a third Progressive Party when he ran for president with Communist backing in 1948.