Bakustra wrote:St/Ae: We need to break public unions!
Moi: Why?
St/Ae: Because they have high wages and the private sector will get jealous (already dishonest here, judging by what you say, but I will address that later)!
The reason for breaking unions is not to avoid jealousy. The reason for breaking unions is that there are no viable options to actually pay for the concessions they forced from the government in much better economic times. Massive deficit spending is already in the process of destroying the US at the federal level, and at the local level it's often not even possible due to balanced budget requirements. General tax rises are out because as I said, it protects a small inefficient portion of the middle class by ravaging the rest. The only remaining option is taxing the rich specifically, but we just saw how that is just not going to happen in the US. Even though it's the best option, it would still be bad if not accompanied by general economic improvements. Not just because the Republican 10 minute hate against the public sector would get more effective, but also because the public sector workers themselves would have even more motive to defend the giant fraud masquerading as a government, because it's the only way they have to maintain their standard of living. Of course hacking the middle class down to a rump completely dependent on the regieme is a standard feature of dictatorships.
Moi: So why not raise private wages?
St/Ae: Globalization! You have to make things worse before they get better! Hurting people is the only way to get anything done!
Moi: Why not work against globalization?
Both myself and Aerius specifically said that policymakers should fight the negative consequences of globalisation. This is the economic equivalent of fighting gravity though, and it's hard. The simple punitive protectionist measures that union boss brains can comprehend generally won't work - though this is academic in the US of course.
St: That has nothing to do with the fact that public employees are overpaid!
Which is correct. Higher public sector wages do almost nothing for the economy as a whole in the best case (of taxing the rich for them), in the realistic case of more deficit spending and punitive regressive taxation (e.g. local sales taxes), in a deep recession, it is harmful.
Do you see the logical disconnect here? Of course you do, but since you're already spouting ultra-left, revolutionary socialist rhetoric while simultaneously denouncing socialism and unions, I doubt that you will acknowledge it. But come on. You know that you're not being honest, I know it, so let us not speak falsely now (the hour is getting late).
Accusing people of lying is facile and frankly silly. The only motivation I or for that matter most people here could have to lie about public policy preferences in a recreational anonymous forum is outright trolling, and personally I don't enjoy that. People may well be wrong, stupid and/or deluded, but I wouldn't usually assume a machivellian agenda.
The only dishonesty I may have engaged in is acting as if there are any realistic, politically doable solutions to these problems. There aren't; the US and much of the rest of the developed world is locked into a trajectory of debt spiral, ever-growing inequality and inevitable massive economic collapse. The strategies I was promoting are what we could have done, circa 1975 to 1995, not what has any chance of happening in the next ten years.
Thirdly, the ideologies that I mentioned are revolutionary socialist ones that seek, in the case of Accelerationism, to establish utopian socialism by "accelerating" capitalism into self-destruction with conspicuous consumption and conscious, insincere adoption and advocation of ultracapitalist viewpoints.
We're going to have a crash in the fall-of-the-USSR class, but exacerbated by global instability and resource shortage. I would not specifically attribute this to capitalism; firstly most first-world nations are a fairly mixed economy and secondly the bulk of the problems come from massive systemic corruption that make free markets a joke (e.g. large companies can buy politicians to easily destroy small competitors). It'll certainly prove that neither capitalism nor democracy provide inherent defence against corruption, cronyism, decay into fascism and ultimate decline. Even so, systems with respect for individual freedom, rights and enterprise will still have lasted longer and done more good along the way than all the failed attempts at commuist utopias (which inherently start screwed from day one).
I don't know what the world will look like when the dust finally settles, but utopian socialism is ridiculously unlikely (and pretty much impossible under any circumstances).
Lowering wages to make everybody suffer is part and parcel of that
You keep saying 'lowering wages' but this issue is not about wages, it is pensions and health benefits. The 1950s notion of a job-for-life with the employer taking care of everything is long since dead in the private sector and good riddance. I'll give the health benefits a pass because the US is too backwards to have single-payer national healthcare, but final-salary pensions are just a horrible anachronism even in principle. The whole thing breeds clock-punching entitlement complex with no motivation to do the job well (save for those rare few people who are self-motivated and still take public-sector jobs that crush all initiative on general principle).
Fourthly, I find it interesting that you assume that no socialist or communist could legitimately be concerned with worker's rights.
Obviously that is a ridiculous strawman that doesn't hold for
any political group or attitude; there are enough people in the world and enough diversity of views that every combination is represented somewhere, including the nonsensical ones. I mentioned my personal experience which includes union representatives focused on worker welfare; this declines extremely rapidly though as you progress up union power structures. It is quite easy to find penniless student communist activists who honestly claim to be concerned for the general good, but it is very difficult to find ruling politicians in historical communist regiemes who did.
Fifthly, it's even more interesting that you feel that you can take your gut assumptions about and experience unions (essentially cribbed from crude propaganda) and project them upon the whole of unionism.
That's pretty much how democracy works. No one person can experience more than a tiny slice of life, we all make best guesses based on what we have seen and in theory it averages out into a good compromise. Obviously that's horribly vulnerable to propaganda in practice, but I personally have spent at least a few hundred hours reading far-left literature, so it's hardly lack of opportunity to make a decent argument. This works in reverse of course; I probably have a lot more personal experience with traders, bankers and fund managers than you, since I work with them and you probably don't. That's why I believe that most of them aren't actually sociopaths and that relatively modest changes to incentive structures could make a vast difference. Though again, as I say, that's academic as those changes simply won't happen prior to the coming crash.
