282 Comments
Comment deleted
Feb 14, 2022
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

"we need to talk about how that works"

Absolutely, but the marxists have been gaslighting us on this for 150 years, so I don't have much hope that they are going to come clean and admit that they have no idea how it's all supposed to work.

Expand full comment

I've seen you comment this a few times on a few different posts and I don't know whether you're being disingenuous or not. In any case, I think in this particular situation, it seems to me, at least, you're missing the forest for the trees. The whole idea is, perhaps, to put that collective productivity to work in various ways, including figuring out the specifics of what you ask. Besides, to my understanding, collective ownership doesn't necessarily imply collectively "manning the ship". That is, assuming the idea would even apply to small businesses.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Feb 14, 2022Edited
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

So you're implying that how socialism is presently conceived will not work?

Expand full comment

I am not being disingenous, I really want to know if any socialist has an actual plan. As far as I can tell, the answer is no.

"Besides, to my understanding, collective ownership doesn't necessarily imply collectively "manning the ship"."

Well according to at least some socialists, that's exactly what it means:

"It would be necessary to draw up a plan, involving the whole of society, on what industry needed to produce. At every level, in communities and workplaces, committees would be set up and would elect representatives to regional and national government – again on the basis of recall at anytime if they disagreed with their decisions. Everybody would be able to participate in real decision-making about how best to run society."

https://www.socialistalternative.org/socialism-in-the-21st-century/how-could-socialism-work/

And does it apply to small businesses, or not? How small is "small"? Etc etc etc.

And if the plan is to work it all out later: sorry, no. Every time socialists have seized power, it's led to total disaster. And that is precisely because THEY HAVE NO ACTUAL PLAN. So they just wing it. And then we end up with dictators-for-life like Xi and Ortega.

So I'm willing to listen if there's an actual plan, with details like what is a small business and what is not. But not before. Before you have that, all you have is slogans and vaporware and a very bad history.

Expand full comment
Comment removed
Feb 14, 2022
Comment removed
Expand full comment

Sure, but then why waste time and effort and good will by advocating for it?

I say: advocate for practical, achievable good things instead.

Like electing more centrist Democrats to red state legislatures who will vote for Medicaid expansion.

Expand full comment
Comment removed
Feb 14, 2022
Comment removed
Expand full comment

agree.

Expand full comment

Why is capitalism always the opposite of socialism? Can't we weave these two things together?

What if we taxed corporations based on the ratio of their highest to lowest earner? Either the corporation shares money, or we'll take it and redistribute it for you, with the idea that the former is actually more efficient and probably makes people happier.

Expand full comment

That's not socialism, by definition. But it's an interesting tax scheme, I like it.

Expand full comment

its not exactly capitalism either. Which is why need ideas like this - turn the whole thing on its head, stop talking about what camp you are in, and come up with new ideas.

Certainly there are smarter people than me out there that can think up this stuff.

Expand full comment

To your first point about materialism as a core principle, I think the preponderance of self-care rituals and memes is proof that people are struggling to remain embodied in, well, their bodies. When you start to believe that language is reality, that the Internet represents life, is there any wonder so many people are so deeply unhappy?

Also, genuine question: if the nation state was eliminated, how would that not yield the tyranny of structurelessness? I’m not sure I agree that nation-statehood itself is a product of capitalism and imperialism exclusively; seems like it’s an inevitable apex level of organization.

Expand full comment

It also leads to people trying to push the river up stream. We didn't address poverty among the elderly by changing the terms we use to describe them or deconstructing the notion of age. We did it through social security, which gave them a bunch of money.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Feb 15, 2022
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

Yes, it becomes simple when you split the problem. Short term homelessness is due to financial difficulty. Long term homelessness is due to mental/drug issues.

When you have energy inflation, people lose the ability to pay their expenses, they lose their homes. When you have general inflation, people lose the ability to pay their expenses, they lose their homes. When you have people sent home due to lockdowns, they lose the ability to pay their expenses, they lose their homes.

We have a trifecta of causes of homelessness: Lockdown poverty, energy poverty, food poverty. The political leadership does not think these are problems. As someone who was long term unemployed and right on the cusp of homelessness as a young guy, I not only know these things, I lived them.

Expand full comment

In retrospect, the only good thing Obama did was expand Medicaid. People were simply given health insurance. It's not complicated.

The more the Left panders to alienated and deranged intellectuals, and tries to give credence to their esoteric critiques, the less likely it is to be successful.

Expand full comment

Also raising the age a child can stay on their parent's plan to 26. But, yeah, I agree, the technocratic shit is useless. Trump repealed the super controversial individual mandate and nothing happened.

Expand full comment

Repealing the individual mandate caused insurance rates to rise. Not catastrophic, but a real and negative effect.

Many of the Obama "technocratic" reforms had real, positive effects for a lot of people.

Expand full comment

Designing the system poorly also caused insurance rates to rise.

Expand full comment

Nonsense

Expand full comment

ACA also allowed people who didn't qualify for Medicaid to buy their own health insurance. Prior to that, there were a lot of people who were simply unable to buy health insurance at any price due to pre-existing conditions.

Expand full comment

Yeah but it's still a mess. 'Designed to fail,' as one health policy *expert* said to me.

Expand full comment

The health care system in the USA is a huge, unruly mess. It's a mish-mash of private and state-run entities, confusing and contradictory regulations and bad incentives.

Expecting that anyone or anything would able to unfuck this whole thing in one go is just ridiculous. It's especially so given the dysfunctional nature of our political system where Joe Lieberman was able to block some very basic things like a Medicare buy in or public option.

Any large and transformative piece of legislation like ACA should go through an iterative process where results are evaluated and legislative changes and corrections are made. But the its opponents refused to allow any such corrections to be made and did everything to break it.

Even still, ACA has improved the lives of millions of Americans in very real ways. Many people have health insurance and access to care that they didn't before. People don't have to worry that their claims will be denied due to pre-existing conditions.

Expand full comment

Yup, I agree. I just think the Medicaid expansion represented >80% of net benefit.

If Dems have another chance I would hope that they could further expand Medicaid to get us close to 100% coverage nationally.

Saying this as someone who does not consider themselves left wing.

Expand full comment

I would state that as "we forcibly took money from the people, with a promise to repay it later."

Expand full comment

And it was paid later and somewhat redistributed in a way that greatly reduced poverty among seniors.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/social-security-lifts-more-americans-above-poverty-than-any-other-program

Expand full comment

There are other social structures than nations. City states, communes, weird viking anarchy. Feudalism. Not all are even the slightest bit structureless.

Expand full comment

True. I guess we could try weird viking anarchy on in the U.S. and see how it works.

Expand full comment

I think the commonality of self-care rituals also speaks to how challenging it can be to live in our capitalist society, though.

Regarding the nation-state, though, I'm not sure I would say it is the "apex", but I do think it has its merits, unless I knew what Freddie was proposing as an alternative.

Expand full comment

For a very simple of example of why nation states are silly, I’m just going to look at the EPA vs what we could be doing instead.

Let’s say we abolish the EPA along with the nation state, and instead we now have the Lake Erie watershed commons and the Mississippi River watershed commons that are managing the resource at the level it makes sense. And now instead of having multiple states, and even multiple nations in the case of a Great Lake managing a water resource, it’s a group that just encompasses that specific natural resource commons. For things like the air and the ocean; ideally the whole world has a say.

To organize between regions, you use some version of federalism.

Furthermore, just because Lake Erie should be managed as one single common resource, it doesn’t mean that everything else public needs managed at that scale - like roads should probably be pretty localized.

Maybe the public library system should be as worldwide as possible to have the best book sharing capabilities, but the local collection should be chosen by people living close enough to utilize the library. The point here is that multiple governance structures can (and I think should) have overlapping districts, based on the region that makes sense for that function. And those regions should be fluid in the case it makes sense for one to expand or shrink.

None of this stuff requires structurelessness, or not electing leaders: it just doesn’t require some ultimate authority, with a monopoly on violence, ruling over an arbitrarily selected chunk of land - a state. Instead govern things at the level that makes sense, and use federalism and dispute resolution bodies to coordinate between regions and governance organizations.

Probably not what FdB has in mind as state abolition, but it’s hopefully an example to show how it might work.

Expand full comment

Isn't this kind of what we already have?

Expand full comment

Yes kind of, but borders and the violence they inspire are pretty bad. And the mono-centric governance schemes we use are not the most effective way we could be organizing.

Lots of other problems with nation states in my opinion as well. Maybe later I will expand on this comment to add more detail/sources.

Expand full comment
Comment removed
Feb 14, 2022
Comment removed
Expand full comment

And why can’t we have a federation of bodies of overlapping jurisdictions instead of Congress and a nation state, with a rigid definition of the size and scope of governance body? Why should we have the executive branch and similar bodies from other governments who can just unilaterally do things that override local governance, without having to get approval from the congress?

You’re right we can’t eliminate human nature - and that makes it even more pressing to have checks on power beyond borders.

Expand full comment

If I had a nickel for every time someone fought a battle over Toledo. Lets just move forward people. Leave the toledoans in peace.

Expand full comment

ROFL.

Expand full comment

I look forward to it! I like the idea of organizations around regional resources that are governed by stakeholders. That makes sense and is far less arbitrary than say state lines.

Expand full comment

You make it sound easy, and I agree we could make some changes along the lines you suggest and things would make more sense. A Lake Erie Commission that doesn't answer to the separate state bodies would probably make more sense, but it should always answer to some higher power. Everything eventually flows to the sea, after all.

Right now we have this going on: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth

So, should we put all ultimate authority under the control of a single global government that can step in and punish any locally governing Commission that gets corrupt?

The problem with that, of course, is that individuals almost invariably succumb to avarice, and so if there is just a tiny group at the top with ultimate power, they will do anything they can to crush dissent. But we desperately need dissent, because that's how we learn about injustices at every level of any given system.

Perhaps the most universal and most dangerous human failing is our craving to be right, and so we must encourage and listen to those who are willing to tell us we are wrong. That becomes a bureaucratic nightmare, of course; the potential arguments against any given human activity are functionally infinite.

Expand full comment

"But we desperately need dissent, because that's how we learn about injustices at every level of any given system."

Not just injustices, but failures of knowledge, too. See the discussion above about science. Crushing of dissent = Lysenkoism (among other bad outcomes).

Expand full comment

Absolutely, I almost wrote "dissent is how we learn, full stop". Listening to people who disagree with us and realizing that they actually have information we don't...that's how learning happens, man. :D

Expand full comment

Here's the disaster in that idea.

In the Lake Tahoe basin, 75 different NGOs/agencies could tell homeowners they couldn't cut the overgrown pine trees, sweep up the beds of mulching pine needles, nor clear brush ... yet none of these agencies were responsible for the resulting unstoppable Angora Fire which burned 200 homes.

Expand full comment

Complicated systems are always hard to manage and benefits and costs are often unevenly distributed among those impacted. That shouldn't rule out the possibility of change for the better, just make us humbler when we consider it. California has always had wildfires. The Angora fire was started by an illegal camper, there is no reason that removing debris would have stopped it, other than your assertion. Do you have any evidence for your beliefs?

Californians have foolishly build a large number of homes in high fire danger areas. Who should pay the cost for when they burn down? Should we continue to provide subsidized insurance so that they can continue to do so?

What about people whose homes have been more likely to burn due to climate change? What should the remedy be for these people?

I don't have all the answers for sure, but when you are in a hole, the first thing you should do is to stop digging.

Expand full comment

Yes, yes, yes. I live in an Oak Woodland Forest in the Sierra Nevada Foothills, I know these things, I live them.

But, we have several problems with governance. First off, environmental groups go out and dictate how much tree harvesting we can happen, how much power line clearing, how much debris cleaning. These thing, trees, forest litter, trees too close to power lines are fire ignition and fire fuel. Fires don't burn without fuel.

Climate change has a role too. Actually the Sierra Nevada has cooled, but CO2 has caused greening, about 40% world wide. Add the greening with the reduction of tree harvesting, the reduction of private forest management, the reduction of public forest management, these add up to increased fire danger. In the 70s and 80s, when I was a teen, rangers then we saying the reduction of forest management will create exactly these problems. These management plans were put in place by the people of the State of California. Mostly by activist environmental-political groups, The Sierra Club, The Nature Conservancy, etc. Of course, its more likely driven by their Lawyers, who stand to make serious bank on suing the state/counties, but that's serious bank that the people paid up front, and now we pay one hundred times more with the results of poor forest management ... driven by big city environmental lobby.

TL;DR: if an environmental org can dictate you can't thin the forest, and fire climbs to the crown (unfightable), who is to blame? I'm pretty sure its not the people who were the root cause of the problem.

Expand full comment

It is most likely in most situations that the people closest to the problem have the best answers. There is room in any debate for the voices of experts but ultimately I think decisions should be made closer to the problem, not in Washington or Sacramento.

Expand full comment

The problem is the Sierra Club Lawyers based in San Francisco want to earn money by suing the state in Sacramento.

Expand full comment

Not that the award means much, but Nobel prize winning economist Eleanor Ostrom and her husband spent their entire careers theorizing and doing empirical studies on the politics of polycentricity and commons resource management. First, what they found is that much of the time a single center of power or privatization are not the ideal solution to a problem. And second, that the “tragedy of the commons” is a myth, and that they are really only worse than state management or private property if you don’t govern the commons correctly.

Unfortunately, as far as I know all of their work is pay walled in academic journals or requires buying a book. But here is a link to her 8 principles for effective commons governance. http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons

In your example, it sounds like principles 3, 4, and 8 were not followed when creating the system, and since we are talking about NGOs I have a feeling it’s even more of them than that.

And also, I’m sure I could dig up individual cases of private property owners or the EPA making horrible environmental decisions. That doesn’t prove that on average, these systems are worse than the alternatives.

Expand full comment

A key benefit of states is that they provide GENERAL services. For a given (often, admittedly, arbitrary) piece of territory, the state provides both an external security apparatus and the internal enforcement apparatus.

The external security apparatus is important to prevent people who are not party to the national agreement from coming in and free riding. (E.g., by polluting.)

Internally, there is one state mechanism that provides dispute resolution (courts), one mechanism of punishment (prisons), and often one investigative machine (though in practice sometimes policing is broken up into different agencies). Because they are general in nature, these internal tools can be used over and over again for a variety of problems -- pollution, but also bribery and child abuse and traffic regulation.

So, take Lake Erie. Your proposal seems to be that we abolish Canada and the United States (two countries that haven't gone to war with each other in almost two centuries) and instead form some kind of Lake Erie commons. But you haven't really said what such a body is. Is it just an agreement? Who enters into it? (And what if a relevant stakeholder doesn't want to enter into it?) Who enforces it -- both internally and externally? I.e., does the Lake Erie commons have an army to prevent outsiders from polluting Lake Erie in ways contrary to the agreement? (Who commands that army?) And does it have its own courts, etc. to deter and punish bad behavior by its members?

Let's say it does have some form of external security and internal enforcement. Does it govern everything that happens in and around Lake Erie -- for example, building roads between Toledo and Buffalo? Is there a separate "roadshed commons" in the Lake Erie area? Does it focus only on roads around the Lake? If so, isn't there some arbitrary point where that commons must end? -- which gets you back to arbitrary physical boundaries. And if there is a dispute about roads, does the roadshed commons have to have a police force, court system, and prison system that is separate from the one used for the Lake Erie commons?

If the answer is that each function of government has to supply itself with its own enforcement mechanisms, that starts to sound quite cumbersome and ineffective. It also sounds like a recipe for constant war, as there will be all these little micro-states asserting power in "overlapping" (i.e., potentially conflicting) areas.

If the answer is that they would pool their resources and submit to a higher authority... that starts to sound like a state. "Federalism" could be the answer -- but it's also the one we already have. Any federalist system strong enough to be effective is essentially a state. And a federalist system that can't exert the powers of a state is... the League of Nations. Or the US under the Articles of Confederation.

I see that below you cite to Elinor Ostrom's work. But that work has to do with small, local communities where you have to face your neighbor's disapproval. There is no reason to think that the mechanisms of hyperlocal social pacts will scale -- and, indeed, the very existence of pollution suggests they do not. Perhaps most crucially, those examples also tend to take place within the context of larger states that provide a safe environment within which a certain amount of spontaneous self-organization is possible.

I guess what I'm saying is that nation-states evolved to solve a large number of problems in a reasonably efficient way, and before we replace them we have to understand how they work and why. If nation-states do many things well but some things poorly, IMO it makes sense to reform them rather than abandoning them. Over time, of course, the reform may be so great that what we are left with no longer looks like the entity we started with. But I think it's incredibly risky to START from the premise that the state itself is the problem, and it should be abolished.

Expand full comment

On the subject of nation-statehood, while I don’t think I have a complete answer to whether or not its organizing structures are the best, I think I have some ideas that can elucidate its context.

I don’t see nation-statehood as a product of capitalism, so much as it’s a product of ideology (nationalism, in this case). It is a conceptualization of social organization that has scaled with the level of inter-social technology and communication that has become possible as globalization has increased over time. Obviously geography and culture and such things play a part, but in the past, the overriding ideologies of social cohesion have been tribal families, religion, race, etc.

Check out Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities”, if you haven’t before. Huge influence on my thoughts on the matter.

I’m inclined to agree with you that on a level of inevitability, the current nationalistic form or social organization is our current apex, despite how much I disagree with nationalism as an ideology. My curiosity lies with what organizational structures would come after the “dissolution of the state”, in lieu of “the terror of bureaucracy” that would still need to exist within organizing structures in a post-capitalist, globalized world.

Expand full comment

Thanks for the book rec. I’ll look into it.

Expand full comment

I think it's also worth noting that nationalism had a role in the break-up of empires and anti-colonial movements. The relationship with imperialism is fairly complex.

Expand full comment

An anecdote I've returned to in my head so many times I think it might just have replaced all my other opinions about current capitalism: A few years ago I had a job interview for a state government lawyer position. One of their interview questions was how I handled "self-care" when work was very stressful. I told them that I worked best when I had a strict work/home balance - I'd stay late at work if needed, work the 14-hour day on a big case deadline, etc., but in order to function I needed work to be work and home to be home, and to leave work at the office whenever I finally left. They straight-up told me that I was supposed to say something like "yoga on lunch break" or "taking a bath." Then implied that I'd told them I didn't intend to work more than the bare minimum.

Message taken! "Self-care" only counts if it's stuff you're buying. Embodiment through consumption!

Expand full comment

This is beautiful.

Expand full comment

I want a *Left wing* political movement that is ignorant of material conditions (and justifies the status quo), that serves to create social status for precarious elites, that panders to my hysteria and narcissism, that validates grudges that developmentally I should have gotten beyond by this point of my life, and that focuses attention on my social class and its strange, esoteric enthusiasms.

Is that too much too ask?

Expand full comment

I’ve got great news for you.

Expand full comment

I'd also like that movement to be grounded in the certainty that we live in a hellish dystopia that cannot be improved by human will and ingenuity, and that any good-faith efforts to suggest otherwise are met with anguished outpourings of scorn and revulsion.

Expand full comment

We should try The Walking Dead org method.

Expand full comment

Well played.

Expand full comment
User was temporarily suspended for this comment. Show
Expand full comment

Beautiful, and absolutely not too much to ask. Working on it :) More soon!

Expand full comment

> My ideal movement would recognize that science exists within human power relations, and that scientific arguments are often used to marginalize other points of view, but it would also recognize that science is key to human flourishing and would engender respect for science even as it permitted skepticism towards the claims of particular scientists.

Lately I honestly almost wish we would stop using the word "science." It gets applied to such a wide variety of practices that its primary use today is for a bait-and-switch. Bait with Newton's second law, and once you have a patina of rigorous knowledge production, swap in an underpowered survey that tells us we should all be assuming the power pose.

> The new world we want to build would take advantage of the incredible productive capacity that capitalism has unleashed on the world and use it to spread material goods through a system of collective ownership.

You write this a lot, but I've never seen you respond to the pretty obvious Lucas Critique that follows. When we take pie capitalism baked and parcel it out, are we not cutting off the branch we are sitting on? Where will next year's productivity come from?

Expand full comment

I'd like to see a shift to believing in "engineering". It's probably the most materialistic field we have. Yes, science makes fundamental discoveries, but it doesn't effect people until it is implemented and tested in the real world. Let's celebrate vaccine research, but also notice that the engineering involved in mass producing vaccines is an order of magnitude more impressive than the vaccine research process.

Chip makers don't need to worry about power poses. Our electrical and sewage systems can't be p-hacked. The heat in your house always works and your car (almost) always starts. You always have water, and the planes stay in the sky. These are engineering marvels that make our lives measurably better and are in deserve of some real praise.

Expand full comment

Maybe not p-hacked, but hacked they can definitely be. Just ask the WaPo about Russia and Vermont's electrical grid. /s

Seriously though I've been saying for a long time that if our "defense" department is really about defending us, the people, from legitimate real world threats, we'd close 90% of our foreign bases and re-direct 80% of the funds toward the USACE and other civil works type programs intended to harden our utilities and infrastructure against such hacks and the effects of climate change/global warming.

Expand full comment

"social engineering" scares the shit out of people

Expand full comment

I was really hopeful about Kathryn Garcia's mayoral campaign for precisely this reason...hopefully she keeps being a force.

Expand full comment

I agree that a response to the critique would be a great column.

While I have some serious disagreements with most of Freddie's political positions, I greatly appreciate his consistency and coherence. In this particular case, I think we might find the key in the argument that we have moved from an age defined by scarcity to one defined by abundance. A post-capitalist world might be one where abundance allows better framing of distribution of that abundance. I'd be interested in seeing how he would envision that or tell me that I missed the point completely.

Expand full comment

Freddie's recent column regarding Capitalism ended with this question: "The compelling questions are, what level of abundance is sufficient to prompt this moral imperative, and how do we know when we’ve gotten there?" I would want to hear an answer too those questions. You could argue we are there now. Or maybe we were there in 1980? I think the problem is that abundance is relative, not absolute. So the moral argument gets difficult when you possibly limit future productivity improvements by moving away from innovation to distribution.

Expand full comment

It also hinges on this weird assumption that we will just sustain the current level of productivity under a fundamentally different model, which isn't obvious at all.

Expand full comment

But even putting that aside and making the assumption we could sustain our productivity and successfully reasonably distribute our current abundance, there still is the moral question of what future abundance we are giving up to do that. The problem of Global Warming is a good example. If we fix our productive capacity in our current fossil fuel powered economy are we dooming our future by not continuing our innovative economy until we find a cleaner form of cheap energy? IOW, I agree it's not obvious *how* we can distribute abundance, but the more fundamental moral questions are *why* and *when* we should do it. (Of course I'm assuming an end to innovation coincides with our move to the distributive model which may not necessarily be the case)

Expand full comment

I mean, if you think free-market capitalism is going to one day give us spaceships and replicators, then I agree that its probably unethical to ever try and move away from it. But it also seems like a huge section of our economic productivity has already shifted away from the kind of big, scientific innovation you are talking about and towards commodification, meaning, taking something that already functions pretty optimally, and tweaking it just enough that you can convince people the new version is now a necessity. Which is part of how we end up confused by what abundance really means.

Put another way, its possible we've reached the level where we can feed, clothe, and shelter everyone and provide for these things in perpetuity, and are denying society those things for the sake of a model that provides newer Iphones every year.

Expand full comment

I think it will. Spaceflight was stagnating and deteriorating for decades until the two richest men in the world decided to change that. In the past it was mainly pushed forward due to the cold war.

I'd prefer capitalism driven progress over war driven progress. So far no other option has proven capable.

Expand full comment

"I think the problem is that abundance is relative, not absolute." I agree. As soon as a human society gets above bare subsistence level (which happened in most places thosands of years ago), the question is how to distribute the excess. It's not a new question.

Expand full comment

In my opinion, if the human race were to ride out our current levels of “innovation” — insanely effective healthcare, psychotropic meds, hand held computers/phones, mass production modes of goods and agriculture — for the entire duration of human civilization, we would be fine.

I think since the invention of penicillan, vaccines, the computer, and the internet, there aren’t many categories of human life that we are so urgently in need of innovation for that the best possible route to it is through competition in a neoliberal corporatized climate. I hear you when it comes to innovation, but I think it needs to be put in perspective.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Feb 15, 2022
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

Sorry, I should’ve clarified, medical practice/technology. Not our healthcare system.

Expand full comment

"the problem is that abundance is relative, not absolute. " - not quite. Absolute poverty does exist, even in the USA and other rich areas.

But most folk who claim to want to "reduce poverty" are more interested, in practice, with hurting the super rich (who ARE on TV), rather than helping the really poor.

And underdiscussed is what to do about lousy, life-style choices. An alcoholic, addicted gambler who is also lazy with a low IQ. The "bad" Forest Gump.

Is the abundance solution merely: give him UBI (daily? weekly?) and let him waste his life in poverty squalor? All historical socialisms seem to require some work - how is that, or any, requirement enforced, if not police? (I support guaranteed jobs, but only voluntary; no complete solution.)

With material abundance, status hierarchy becomes more important - and there's not a lot of room up at the top 10%. The vast majority, we among the 90%, ain't there and ain't getting there, and there's no level of abundance that changes that. Capitalist economics is a positive sum - that's why we're getting richer.

Status is zero sum - you can only go up if somebody else goes down.

Humans, as human, are status conscious and status seeking. But maybe we can create a culture which is less so, and thus better, than what we have now.

Expand full comment

I once heard a conservative argue for basic income on exactly these grounds: once the social safety net is robust enough, you can finally say to someone honestly "look, society has treated you fairly, from this point on, you have to figure it out for yourself." I'm not sure I agree entirely, but its an interesting argument that someone on the Right found very sympathetic.

Expand full comment

Charles Murray likes UBI - to replace some 72 (?) or so other, targeted, expensive, means-tested programs.

A reasonable idea from a Libertarian, not quite conservative.

But I support a Jobs Offer instead; a volunteer National, or State, or City Service.

>> partly to replace those other programs.

Expand full comment

I think the argument against that is that you are going to create pointless busywork just to justify paying people when you could be more efficient (and kinder) just giving them the money.

Expand full comment

The reality of human nature is that people will not work for the collective good. They just won't. People work hard when it is in their own interest. Ask ANY child who has done well on a test or made money at a lemonade stand they built and operated on their own if they then will give away their reward to people who did nothing so they're even. Universally, they will say no. Socialism/communism never works because it totally disregards human nature for an ideal where we're all suddenly selfless, egoless, and aimless. Scandinavian "democratic socialist" countries aren't truly socialist - they do embrace capitalism - and only work to the extent they have because they have a very homogenous culture.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Feb 14, 2022Edited
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

I think what it comes down to for me is that so much of capitalist argument is "man, human nature just BLOWS. Like, we are the WORST. And you think SOCIALISM would work???"

Like, okay. People die getting eaten by tigers or drinking water infected by cholera, too. Like you realize you're just arguing against the very concept of civilization, right? Fucking weirdos. I can't wait until they all go to Mars.

Expand full comment

What the left lacks is a coherent morality. The religious teach kids things like selflessness (at least ostensibly) in service of a higher power. Morality CAN be taught. It’s harder to come up with an agreed-upon moral code without the unifying principle of, say, a god and his or her wishes.

Expand full comment

Sometimes I think the left should adopt Star Trek as a religion. I'm only half joking. It would be a great basis for a socialist talmudic religion.

Expand full comment

Or something with science in it. Scientism. Scienceology? 😏

Expand full comment

Please god I’ve seen what they did to Clearwater, I thought I escaped 😩

Expand full comment

Star Fleet is a command-and-control military organization. Picard, one of its most respected leaders, is an aristocratic white man who periodically retreats to his family's vineyard. This doesn't feel like a left-wing political alignment to me, if anything it's rightist.

Expand full comment

"Workers of the world, unite, and put the old white guys with vinyards in charge!" is /very/ on-brand for the contemporary Left.

Expand full comment

That seems to be how it works in California.

Expand full comment

Indeed. Look what they did to the last worker who ran for an office that was earmarked for a vinyard-owner.

"Workers of the world, unite!"

<beat>

"NOT LIKE THAT!"

Expand full comment

Starfleet is not the Federation and form does not always equal function.

Expand full comment

But, a more robust answer: the primary issue with Star Trek in all its forms is that it is a product of a very particular economic model and also is a product of 20th and 21st Century America with all its unexamined assumptions about modernity, western capitalism, etc. But despite all that it posits a more hopeful and optimistic take on humanity than just about any of piece of creative/narrative art that anyone can think of. Star Trek: The Next Generation is basically about pleasant space communists tooling around the galaxy helping others with no expectation of reciprocity. It's sci-fi solidarity, the tv show.

Expand full comment

Then Deep Space Nine came and turned it on its head. Sure, the Federation worked when they were allied with the Klingons and the Romulans mostly kept to themselves.

Then the Federation came under real pressure from the Dominion and all hell broke loose.

Expand full comment

Deep Space Nine is the Kaballah of Star Trek.

Expand full comment

Please no. After several years of trying to do this with Wokism, the last thing I need is a widely accepted and socially enforced moral system. I need to be able to make up my own mind about things.

Empathy is just fine.

Expand full comment

Oh I don’t want that. I’m just saying it’s an easy way to organize toward a specific aim.

Expand full comment

Can you have one without the other?

Expand full comment

The most basic form of liberalism is I think a structure for morality. I don't think morality has to be religious in nature; it's just easier to get people in line when say eternal damnation is at stake.

Expand full comment

There is NO NEUTRAL in right and wrong, tho most morality includes freedom where non-wrong actions are accepted. Everything "taught" includes some morality. Ayn Rand's (Libertarian adjacent) Objectivism notes this (but it's too self-oriented to be socially optimal.)

As you say, there's no agreed-upon moral code. There is not even an agreed upon "social optimal":

What level of drunkeness is "too much"? What speed is "too fast"?

How much shaming of "bad behavior" is acceptable? Who decides what is "bad"?

Expand full comment

C'mon man. That's not true at all. Sure there are lots of factions and each is peculiar in its own way, but I can go to the DSA website and look at their principals and so can you.

Start with FDRs "Four Freedoms" and you have a basic outline of what leftists almost all agree upon.

Expand full comment

"Socialism/communism never works because it totally disregards human nature for an ideal where we're all suddenly selfless, egoless, and aimless"

Except that's not what socialism says, like, at all.

Expand full comment
Comment removed
Feb 14, 2022Edited
Comment removed
Expand full comment

Yes, well said.

The imcompatibility of socialism with human nature is demonstrated by the lack of any details in the socialist vision of society. Where is the draft legislation that will implement it?

There is also a complete lack of compelling socialist art.

Where are all the novels set in the socialist utopia of the future, showing us all how great it is to live there?

Those novels don't exist. I claim that's because nobody can even imagine a believable socialist future.

Expand full comment

What the actual hell are you talking about? I would posit that if you don't think they exist, then you're not very well-read.

You could spend the next year reading the collected works of Iain Banks and Kim Stanley Robinson, and that's just for starters.

Expand full comment
Comment removed
Feb 14, 2022
Comment removed
Expand full comment

I think that’s generally correct but not the whole story. Banks positions them as communist. And the AIs don’t really run the Culture but they do participate in it.

Expand full comment

I think my favorite is Le Guin's "The Dispossessed." She portrays a very believable communist society without glossing over the inconvenient realities of human nature (hence the subtitle, "An ambiguous utopia").

Expand full comment

The Dispossessed is excellent!

Expand full comment

I've read some Banks and a lot of Robinson and pretty much all of LeGuin.

The anarchist state in The Dispossessed seems like a pretty miserable place to live, which is why the book's protaganist feels compelled to leave it! He had to go to the capitalist state to get his society-transforming ideas recognized.

Robinson's recent book about the intergenerational starship shows the collapse and failure of an enforced communist society.

Banks is too far future to be relevant.

So I've not seen anything that presents a working socialist society in a recognizable version of our world that feels remotely realistic.

Expand full comment

The Dispossessed is about a lot more than just that. Urras is wealthier but much less free. I think that was kind of an honest assessment by Le Guin. She could have made it a polemic but it is much more interesting by being complicated.

I think it is odd that you find the Urras more compelling with its wars, its prisons and its stratified society, but I am not surprised. Each is represented warts and all.

Expand full comment

Got it. Enjoy capitalism. You won, after all. Go enjoy it!

Expand full comment

The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. Start there.

It's not hard to imagine a better world with less hierarchy, no poverty, less government control, fewer wars, no billionaires and no more freedom.

You just lack imagination.

The demand for a perfect blueprint for the future is an absurd one. But the roadmap to a better place is right there in front of you.

Expand full comment