• rekabis@lemmy.ca
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    22 hours ago

    The 80s were already the second decade of the decline after the gold standard was revoked in 1971 and wages became decoupled from productivity. Everything was on a slowly accelerating slide downhill from there, although it took until the 90s for the first people to truly notice things were going sideways.

    You want a real economic golden era? Try the 50s and the 60s, where a single wage earner could work a low-end service-level job (selling shoes, for example), and make enough to own a detached SFH, a car in the garage, support a SAH spouse and several children, go on modest vacations every year with at least one more ambitious one every few years, and still have enough left over to save generously for retirement.

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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      21 hours ago

      Abandon your monetarist goldbug worldview, the gold decoupling and subsequent floating of the international exchange rates are downstream of the actual policy decision that have emiserated the population.

      The globalists open the western worker to global competition, they lost their leverage by losing their scarcity and competence.

      The subsequent decline comes from the system’s inertia and the burning of the future with debt and literally the future by having spending money instead of kids.

      If you want the golden age back for normal people, then there is NO REMEDY other than giving them their leverage and power back.

      But how do you do that ? Taxes and interest rates serve to dis-empower those who need it the most and regular people are the one MOST hurt by these.

      The neoliberal religion refuses to treat people who “win” the game of capital differently than regular people, as if they were somehow on an equal footing.

      The result ? The more wealth you have the easier it becomes to acquire and accumulate more of it. This needs to be exactly reversed, the poorer you are, the easier it should be to acquire but the more you have the harder it gets. Up until a point where it becomes nearly impossible to go beyond the “capital horizon” some kind of equilibrium state where wealth can lo longer be acquired faster than you lose it.

      It’s not some shiny metal bullshit which only serves the status quo like discussion about which toilet should a trans person piss in.

      • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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        5 hours ago

        The more wealth you have the easier it becomes to acquire and accumulate more of it. This needs to be exactly reversed,

        you have a good point, we should tax the rich

        The globalists open the western worker to global competition, they lost their leverage by losing their scarcity and competence.

        again, you have a good point, neoliberalism including world-wide free-trade hurt american economics more than it helped them, both for the individual worker and big business. i’m all for closing borders (including high tariffs on imports, which are a kind of “soft” border). unfortunately, most people stand against that because the neoliberal brainwashing that open borders benefit us all was very effective and now a lot of people, including leftists and people who openly hate on neoliberalism are against borders. (which is highly ironic).

        but also, i think your analysis is short and lacking.

        you’re only looking at the supply of human workers. if that increases, wages go down. but also, you’re ignoring the demand for human workers. that demand is far from constant and directly coupled to economic growth. The Limits To Growth predicted back in the 1970s that the economy would have to stop growing and now it does, and that reduces the demand for human workers a lot a decreases wages. Consider how many people it takes to build a house vs. maintain a house. No growth, no significant demand for human labor.

        • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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          1 hour ago

          The demand for human labour is consciously manipulated to create artificial scarcity and then gluts on purpose, to guide human growth, a recent a egregious example of this is excessive hiring followed by excessive firing by big tech, is clearly intentional and integral to the labour supply side of their blitzscaling machine.

          Create excessive demand by overhiring, drawing masses to overwrite their souls with the machinery required by industry, once saturation was achieved, they massively purged, leaving the manipulated humans with useless information indelibly etched into their brain. I cannot overstate how evil this is and how irresponsible communities are for just letting that happen to their members.

          Of course the paralytic stunning of the duty of care of those communities is a major feature of global neoliberalism.

          There will not be a reduction in demand for labour, in fact I believe we will see demand far beyond that which came after the Black Plague. But the elites are positionning themselves to “win in a seller’s market” with their incessant manipulation.

          While I agree somewhat with the limits to growth narrative, it has largely been recuperated by the club of rome / population bomb narrative to turn the limits to growth from a rational anti-capitalist narrative into weapons of the elite against the people for maximal exploitation in the very name of capitalism and it’s fake lures “innovation” and “efficiency” something it can never delivery, by definition, by being a greedy parasite on both and having massively slowed technological progress that could have delivered both, either by patent (3d printer delayed 20 years) or bombs (killing cybersyn so Walmart could make it instead).

          A reduction of demand for human labour should have been a boon and desirable, all jobs should be abolished and made obsolete, “work” is an heinous and exploitative imposition on others for profit extraction, life extraction of the human cattle. Work IS the tool of the enemy.

          Wages should not have been allowed to be boxed in by convoluted supply and demand models of fabulating economists, we live in a world much richer than excel spreadsheets than will never fit inside the skull mush of some economist no matter how much they want us to believe we must sacrifice our lives to the profit of their masters.

          The problem is distribution, it has been the entire time, capitalists have been distributing all the wealth into their pockets and buying dominating power of the state with it.

          The state has been infected by the capital parasites and it’s time to amputate

      • rekabis@lemmy.ca
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        16 hours ago

        Abandon your monetarist goldbug worldview, the gold decoupling and subsequent floating of the international exchange rates are downstream of the actual policy decision that have emiserated the population.

        I never said they were directly related, I just wanted to point out that they both occurred in the same year, in 1971.

        This needs to be exactly reversed, the poorer you are, the easier it should be to acquire but the more you have the harder it gets. Up until a point where it becomes nearly impossible to go beyond the “capital horizon” some kind of equilibrium state where wealth can lo longer be acquired faster than you lose it.

        👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

        Absolutely.