Working just to survive has a lot of people that don’t survive. People reasonably aspire to more than being tethered like an ox to a water wheel being fed enough to survive to trudge around for life in a circle going nowhere.
For a productive society laws should support patents for actual inventors at low cost or free of charge to stimulate invention and progress allowing quick social adaptation to challenges rather than the inertial resistance of concentrated wealth dominating the way things are. Unreformed capitalism encourage luxury purchases. It reinforces wrong social choices and values counterproductive to actual human interests. Advertising and wealth reinforce luxury and senselessness. Presently there is a young women that people have started a fund for so she might achieve being the youngest female billionaire (she only has 900 million apparently). Reforming capitalism, Christian church structure toward a priesthood of believers, and economics to environmental economics are important yet the former example highlights the detached from more than excess consumerism way of life people are compelled by circumstance to be.
One might ask; with interest for savings so low, and banks even unreliable storehouses; won’t people spend their earnings on luxuries rather than save the money as they did in former times?
President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to tax the rich at a 100% rate but settled for 90%. After World War Two the national tax rate remained high and an egalitarian spirit prevailed across the nation. Twenty million Americans had been in uniform during the war. The difference between rich and poor wasn’t nearly as great as today. I Suggest reading Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty for a good trove of data.
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/0674979850
Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class was published long ago. Leisure in that day was something the Vanderbilts expressed in the Breakers mansion. Conspicuous consumption was a device of the most rich.
The idea of progress and the egalitarian nature of democracy with elected governments supported the concept that the ordinary man (and women) should be well off too. Capitalism entailed competition and people had the ethic of self-help, prosperity and a socially governed economy that supported an increase in the capital of the poor and middle classes. Today that has ended to a certain extent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States
Wealth is being concentrated in the United States as never before in its history. Taxes on the most rich have been cut so far that their wealth increases orders of magnitude faster than the earnings of ordinary people, even if they just collect rents. The rich therefor can buy up whatsoever they like while the Federal Reserve issues trillions of zero or very low interest loans to big banks so they can mint five dollars in loans themselves for each free dollar the U.S. Federal Reserve issued them.
And there is tremendous public debt and millions living in poverty. Fifty millions citizens share less than one-half of one percent of the national income. Federal elections basically go to millionaires and billionaires and rarely a sycophant of an establishment becoming plutocratic who is not yet a millionaire and needs to wait until elected. One percent of the people of the United States control about 40% of private income.
US. and media leadership control the agencies of socialization with values that reinforce the way things are. It is difficult to change anything at all. Women and former minorities demand wealth or the opportunity to have it. Foreigners want wealth and will even illegally invade the USA. to try to earn more dollars than they could at home in their own nation. The social forces for keeping the inertia of unreformed capitalism going are strong and met only by a weak and theoretically defeated socialist political rivals. A mixed capitalist-socialist economy in a form called Corporatism under the power of Plutocrats seems to be the prevailing government philosophy. Bread and circuses, soma- dope and entertainment are what the masses require to be held in thrall and without any sort of brainwave that would challenge or even think to challenge the governing philosophy.
It is possible to reform capitalism to direct it toward a greater egalitarianism and natural selection of ecospheric synergistic business yet surprisingly to me people seem to be clueless of the opportunity or need to do so.
For a productive society laws should support patents for actual inventors at low cost or free of charge to stimulate invention and progress allowing quick social adaptation to challenges rather than the inertial resistance of concentrated wealth dominating the way things are. Unreformed capitalism encourage luxury purchases. It reinforces wrong social choices and values counterproductive to actual human interests. Advertising and wealth reinforce luxury and senselessness. Presently there is a young women that people have started a fund for so she might achieve being the youngest female billionaire (she only has 900 million apparently). Reforming capitalism, Christian church structure toward a priesthood of believers, and economics to environmental economics are important yet the former example highlights the detached from more than excess consumerism way of life people are compelled by circumstance to be.
One might ask; with interest for savings so low, and banks even unreliable storehouses; won’t people spend their earnings on luxuries rather than save the money as they did in former times?
President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to tax the rich at a 100% rate but settled for 90%. After World War Two the national tax rate remained high and an egalitarian spirit prevailed across the nation. Twenty million Americans had been in uniform during the war. The difference between rich and poor wasn’t nearly as great as today. I Suggest reading Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty for a good trove of data.
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/0674979850
Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class was published long ago. Leisure in that day was something the Vanderbilts expressed in the Breakers mansion. Conspicuous consumption was a device of the most rich.
The idea of progress and the egalitarian nature of democracy with elected governments supported the concept that the ordinary man (and women) should be well off too. Capitalism entailed competition and people had the ethic of self-help, prosperity and a socially governed economy that supported an increase in the capital of the poor and middle classes. Today that has ended to a certain extent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States
Wealth is being concentrated in the United States as never before in its history. Taxes on the most rich have been cut so far that their wealth increases orders of magnitude faster than the earnings of ordinary people, even if they just collect rents. The rich therefor can buy up whatsoever they like while the Federal Reserve issues trillions of zero or very low interest loans to big banks so they can mint five dollars in loans themselves for each free dollar the U.S. Federal Reserve issued them.
And there is tremendous public debt and millions living in poverty. Fifty millions citizens share less than one-half of one percent of the national income. Federal elections basically go to millionaires and billionaires and rarely a sycophant of an establishment becoming plutocratic who is not yet a millionaire and needs to wait until elected. One percent of the people of the United States control about 40% of private income.
US. and media leadership control the agencies of socialization with values that reinforce the way things are. It is difficult to change anything at all. Women and former minorities demand wealth or the opportunity to have it. Foreigners want wealth and will even illegally invade the USA. to try to earn more dollars than they could at home in their own nation. The social forces for keeping the inertia of unreformed capitalism going are strong and met only by a weak and theoretically defeated socialist political rivals. A mixed capitalist-socialist economy in a form called Corporatism under the power of Plutocrats seems to be the prevailing government philosophy. Bread and circuses, soma- dope and entertainment are what the masses require to be held in thrall and without any sort of brainwave that would challenge or even think to challenge the governing philosophy.
It is possible to reform capitalism to direct it toward a greater egalitarianism and natural selection of ecospheric synergistic business yet surprisingly to me people seem to be clueless of the opportunity or need to do so.
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