"Admit Nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-Accusations"
Why am I not surprised to see this kind of instinctive reaction. I don't want to debate your points because that is way out of scope for this thread and I don't want to be chased out.
Why do you have to make work fun, shouldn't you already be enjoying it if you are doing what you want to do? Are you not doing what you want to do? See, that's the kind of problem that creates the infantilisation.
This is Capitalism. Everything has to be family friendly so it can reach as wide an audience as possible. When you're waiting for customer support, you have to hear a fun jingle so you don't get upset. People have to be talked down to like children so they know their place in the wealth hierarchy. It's an ideology, not in the sense of political beliefs, but rather false ideas that dominate society that we all subconsciously hold to maintain the social system we built on contradictory premises.
I don't think I've presented the full picture, but you asked where this trend is coming from, and to me this is the only common factor and starting point of investigation.
The idea that the alternative to copyright means artists working for free is an ideological conflation not even the wealthiest, most cynical person on earth could have dreamt up.
The argument a layman would make in favour of this is:
"if people know they could rent seek with their intellectual property and potentially make millions of dollars charging people for licenses / gatekeeping their work, well that's going to motivate them to create really good work! Without this motivation, no one would create good work"
And it's like, ignoring all the well-established counter-arguments to this, it kind of seems to justify its own existence through contradiction. It says, in essence, "We have to coerce people into making really good work by not giving them the building blocks that they could use to make really good work"
I find the show to be incredible, not just in terms of rhetoric but actually just aesthetically, it's got very pleasing visuals and there is no overuse of edits and sound.
But sometimes i see the way david simon acts on twitter and i reconsider how good the show actually was. It's hard to believe it was even made by him.
Are you suggesting you'd kill someone if they tried to tax you slightly more highly? Or if they took some of your child's inheritance according to a means tested solution? That is very weird.
This is a lot of odd, complex moral statements used to denounce a comparatively simple and separate idea, that wealth should be distributed somewhat more fairly. Inequality is going to persist in other areas and probably even in financial areas, but that doesn't make taxes robbery.
Liveable necessities like water, food, and housing, that are either wasted on inefficient food production methods or given to rent-seekers (by the economic definition of the term). No one is claiming we are post-scarcity and that everyone can have the standard of living of a millionaire, though I would argue that one having a standard of living like this could take away from other people's standard of living.
Basically my argument, since this thread is quite far down now, is that over-population is not robbing the globe of resources in any amount worth worrying about and therefore population control is not going to solve inequality since it's a distribution problem.
It's a big topic to get into, but what I really mean is there are certain resources that we either throw away or don't distribute that wouldn't require relocation, and could be given to people without needing to police them for having kids or whatever. Do you not think Nigeria and Bangladesh have this problem as well? It's not just the developed world. Underdeveloped countries have resource allocation problems and definitely have excess resources in some cases.
An example of a market failure is climate change, or at least many market failures are contained within this problem. Are you suggesting the government take a hands off approach to that? At the end of the day the government is necessary to the functioning of capitalism, we need to help people out of poverty so that among other things the economy can actually improve. That's all I'm arguing for, and I think there is undeniable proof of it at this point.
This is a logical leap i'm afraid. We have been trying to give people what they need using government welfare for a century now. It's not communism to correctly understand that some people need to be given opportunities to prove themselves in the market regardless of their race, wealth, etc.
> It is the hereditary nature of wealth which is the largest contributor to long-term inequality.
Hereditary wealth is a specific form of rent-seeking which is something liberal economics has no explanation for. It's like one of those things that never left the feudal era whilst everything else did. But I wonder why some who follow this type of economics think this is the sole and most important issue? There are many examples of rent-seeking and this is far from the biggest contributor towards inequality.
Population control is a very outdated idea, we have enough resources for the population, we just don't know how to distribute them using free market models.
For those that are inevitably about to argue and downvote the above... It seems the economy is returning, smartly, towards keynesian models because we've seen first hand how destructive the past 50 years of austerity and free market economics has become. Its clear to me that we need to have a strong government to save the economy from market failures, including but not limited to job guarantees echoing those of the new deal in the 30s. Don't have to be a marxist to see that.
This story is deeper than 'life crushed this one individual's childhood dreams'.
At any turn during the story, the author could have become something much worse. He could have become a drunk, he could have become homeless. The invisible hand of the economy dangled his future in front of him as a tease and then handed him a job in the end as a threat, telling him never to be ungrateful or else.
It's a retrospective on the ways in which average people can have their lives warped by externalities. At the end the author wonders about the version of himself that became beatnik, but what about those versions of himself that became drunk and homeless? Well, those don't exist in parallel universes. They exist in this universe, as other people in the same situation as him, the same situation shared by 90% of people.
"Admit Nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-Accusations"
Why am I not surprised to see this kind of instinctive reaction. I don't want to debate your points because that is way out of scope for this thread and I don't want to be chased out.