If the economy were operating under rationality it would probably stop feeding elderly people as they can’t do any work and don’t provide much in the way of productivity, for example.
See, so that’s like, I dunno if that’s so much a problem. First off, rationality is sort of just a method that you’re using to affect some type of process, in this case, economic efficiency Under which it probably also wouldn’t make sense to, say, just throw old people off of big towers or whatever type of thing. People would probably overthrow your system, you’d deal with a high level of instability, and being unable to track people’s ages effectively, which seems pretty inefficient, people might also try to move, or leave your system as they get older. So I’d expect some level of brain drain there, which leads to another point: You’re also decreasing any worker productivity you would gain from old joe who ran the lumber yard still being around, so you can ask him questions about the quirks of the lumber yard. Maybe old joe even just boosts worker productivity by the fact that he makes his family and friends happier, and more able to tolerate bad working conditions, longer work hours, or more desirable than that, maybe he gives them the will to learn more, and bring you better higher level jobs where they will be ultimately much more efficient for whatever time they do end up spending on production. But back to rationality, that’s just a method you’re using to evaluate things. In this case, maybe “efficiency”, which is sort of a proxy value for other, more real values. Efficiency to do what? Usually by, economic efficiency, we mean like, we’re minimizing the necessary inputs, to affect some productive capacity, while maximizing the outputs, in like, a material way. But then, maybe the sort of our core value that we’re chasing after should be to maximize the happiness that old joe is capable of giving to his friends and family, or something harder to define and measure, and more along those lines. That, that would maybe be a flaw of socialist systems, that we don’t have some universal definition of a “good” to work towards, but I would say that, again, that’s not a distinct flaw of those systems in particular, and in capitalism, that just gets subsumed by a bunch of other bullshit values. You don’t have a universal definition of good, because you’re always just making short term moves to maximize the profit of your company. Moral miasma, zombification.
Getting even more off topic, I think in general though my main counterargument is just that like. Any risk we take by defining a “good”, right, a good to work towards, I think that’s a good risk to take. To take the risk that, by defining the good, you eliminate other definitions of “good” that could’veexisted, and the freedom to have those other definitions of good. It’s better to take that risk, and define that good, and then work towards it (and mostly, even to point out that such a core value exists, in practice, even acknowledge that it exists, more than anything else.). I think it’s better to do that, than substitute your “good” for “freedom”, which, like efficiency (and even like “good”, but shhh), is just a proxy value for other things. In the market, in capitalism, we define freedom as the ability to own capital, own property, spend money on what you want to spend it on, and work to death in a soul-sucking 9-5 flipping calorically and nutritionally deficient burgers for a bunch of other people who have worked to death in a soul-sucking 9-5 doing equally insane things. We define no “good” in capitalism, we just leave that shit up to the market, and the market already reaches a decision, which is that every little corporation should just replicate authoritarianism in their little shithole section of the economy. Every little corporation gets their “good”, and then they fight it out in the marketplace. Ends up that actually, we’ve just blown this up to be even every single individual, because, again, we’ve adopted freedom as our current value. Swim in the water, stop knowing that it’s there. Big shocker when the individuals at the highest level of the market, having passed through many tests to get there, big shocker when their personal definition of “good” is fucked up, short sighted, and when they can’t implement said definition if they even have one, because when they decide to do so, they get curbstomped for engaging in too much long term thinking compared to just sucking up as much of the industry as is possible at the time. I’m also not even saying that a monopoly is bad necessarily, right, as an alternative to this, I’m just saying that it’s hypocritical to the supposed value of capitalism, which should be to use market economics to do these calculations at basically every level (which I’m also not convinced would be more efficient then just doing them somewhere else). It also tends to be bad because it still exists within this context in which all this short term incentive is naturally floating around and in which the highest powers in the land are naturally selected to be bad authoritarians.
But take the ICE, for example. I fucking hate the ICE. Mostly because it has enabled mass market automobiles to become a thing, which has impacted our transportation infrastructure in a very adverse set of ways, with an adverse set of incentives. Suburbanization blows up out of white flight as america, conceived as a sort of colonial experiment in a time of slavery, obviously has a lot of hangups around 18th century conceptions of racial superiority. Then you have the corporate lobbying that affects the political system, on top of the general political system just being tailored for the wealthy from the jump (and being tuned to the wealthy over time), and badda bing badda boom pretty soon you’re ripping out LA’s streetcars to instead flood the streets with massive chunky automobiles that kill a ton of people per year, fill the air with leaded and mostly unregulated particulate emissions, and we’re like a century into that as a system now, so we’re basically locked in, and none of the fundamental problems with cars as a format have been solved, even with EVs, you’re still getting particulate emissions from brakes, lithium mining issues, you’re still getting road wear and expenses from that, you’re still spreading out cities much more than they need to be which massively increases the necessary power consumption by decreasing the r-values of homes by increasing the surface area of homes and increasing the surface area of a home in which a singular person is going to live and increasing the volume of air inside the home per person which is necessary to be heated, and then we have relay stations so we need to spend more money to pump more electricity and water a longer distance and so on and so forth. We can talk about socialism as a distinct set of values as mostly divorced from questions of authoritarianism, because it’s assumed that we’re doing this, in good faith, to decentralize ownership of everything, ownership of the workplace, restoring the ownership of the means of production to the proletariat and all that good shit. We can assume all that to be the case, right, oh, and then since we don’t want market economies to really re-emerge, replicating class dynamics inside of the apparatus of the corporation, we go from having a co-operative to just having the corporation be owned by the public, and then maybe that’s “authoritarian” even if we have a more democratic voting system than a capitalist country is allowed to have. Whatever, those are all good debates to have, those sorts of debates, they’re what socialists are gonna talk about in a sort of abstract sense, and then they’re all gonna draft up lines like, oh, I’m a marxist because of XYZ, whatever. My concern, personally, is sort of like, I look at the market economy, at capitalism, and the supposed “freedom” it provides people, in the market, to make totally dunderheaded, propagandized decisions, that if you look at them in the abstract, make totally no sense whatsoever. My concern is that we currently find ourselves in a system where all of that shit about the ICE exists, and the ICE isn’t just used to power like, a bunch of farm vehicles somewhere, and then everyone else takes the train because if I talk through every other point about car use then obviously none of it makes any sense to any set of values that isn’t “I want to kill people with my car” or “I want to waste a lot of gas” or “I want to intentionally spend a lot of money” or “I want to look cool and feel cool and manly”, type shit. That, is multiplied for like every other facet of the economy, that times a million. I hate that shit, mostly more than anything. That we can come to the correct takeaways and decisions, and then do nothing about it because the system doesn’t care. I don’t care so much how we get there, or even necessarily how authoritarian a given system is, because I think about the most that can be expected from people who have been in a capitalist society is to vote for the replication of said capitalist society with maybe some socialized benefits, democratic socialismo style, and I fully expect that shit to get rolled back in 50 years and also to exploit the third world since obviously people outside the jurisdiction of the state aren’t allowed to vote in the state’s elections. Really all I want is for everyone to just have healthcare, everyone to have good regional transit, for our energy infrastructure to make sense, our food infrastructure to make sense, I want people to stop dying in wars, whatever. The current global system fucking sucks for all that stuff. That’s mostly the only reason why I get pushed towards socialism. Mostly the specifics only exist for me insofar as they affect or not my ability to enforce that idea of “good”, which I think is pretty sensible once it actually gets spelled out into the material.
This is a good point I shockingly hadn’t thought about until now, but, true, biden could stop sending weapons, and then harris could decide to still stand as though she supports israel in order to minimize any viable hit to her polls, since he’s the one in power but he’s not actually running for re-election. But also, what jewish voters? What, single issue, jewish voters, exist in a valuable swing state, that aren’t already voting for republicans? You could maybe put up nevada or arizona, where they make up 2.6% and 1.7% of the state’s population, but you have to weight that against michigan, where muslim voters make up 2.4% of the population. I think wisconsin also has a larger percentage of muslim voters than jewish voters, as well. I’ve also seen a couple polls that suggest that jews have about as favorable a view of israel as the average american, I’m not even really sure that they’re a specific demographic to point out. Orthodox and conservative jews, maybe. There’s another handful of calculations you can make there, but that also doesn’t really factor in that by far the largest cohort which is going to be voters on supporting israel is probably evangelical christians, which are also obviously going to be a huge piece of the republican base, and that’s not something you’re going to strip away by outflanking them, like democrats are currently also trying to do with the border. The main democratic base, though, is going to be a myriad of different people, since they tend to be more popular overall, more popular in ethnically diverse cities, whatever, and it’s definitely going to be very alienating to the base to decide to keep pumping weapons into israel, take a harder stance on the border, and provide no real tangible economic policy to improve people’s lives.
Not to mention, none of these electioneering calculations, over less than 3% of the population, in very particular states, really means that it’s a good decision ethically, economically, geopolitically, to not pull back on the reigns of the rabid dog we’ve had plopped down in the middle east. Mostly to protect an insanely stupid global trade port that we’re using to help ship chinese goods to europe, and maybe also using to train a couple cops we can deploy to shoot fare evaders and also like 3 other people. Everyone loves to play at an election journalist and say, ah, well, this just a strategic move that exists for some other theoretical person that exists, it’s not really for me. They never actually defend the policy on it’s own merits. Then, consistently ignore the same thing happening, repetitively, for like 30 years, since that electioneering shit was really coined as a strategic rhetorical move afaik. The country shifting rightward, that’s not just some sort of like, crazy coincidence, and it’s not something that’s due to random chance events that happened to screw the democrats over and force them to consistently slide to the right for the last, well, last 80 years, at this point. It’s because the like 30% of hardline voters are willing to parrot the same swill they’re given, and are totally willing to slide as right as is necessary and follow the dems off a cliff, it’s because the american population at large is captured by a huge corporate propaganda apparatus that the democrats are not willing to do anything about, it’s because the american population is swamped by a nosedive in standards of living and a shrinking middle class and are looking for an easy scapegoat. At any point, dems could’ve pointed out that illegal immigrants are, in total, fucking 3% of the population. They don’t, because they don’t really care, because it’s the institutional security stance that we should be more xenophobic to shore up against climate refugees.
Me? I’m not a swing state voter, so I’m just gonna vote for whichever third party candidate is a valid write-in and also maybe seems like they’ll get enough to get federal funding, if that exists, and otherwise I’ll just vote for claudia de la cruz.