The Economic Apollo Program
 

Start here--read this: Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

So you know what you're clicking-on, it's George Monbiot in The Guardian. Not quite long form, but longish medium. Here's the subtitle: 'Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative?'

Now, I'll quote his last paragraph:

Can we talk about what a new system could be?

1st, is a sustainable strategy achievable?

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Listening to Thom Hartman are we?

I too think understanding leoliberalism is critical to our understanding of the mess we're in. It is the economic manifestation of Randian Objectivism. It is "end stage capitalism". There's nothing left for Capitalism to devour but itself.

This cannot be stopped. The forces of neoliberalism are so powerful and so entrenched that nothing, short of a popular uprising on a global scale, will overturn the system. This will have to play itself out and it will not be pretty.

Before one replaces a system, one needs to have another system pretty much worked out in advance. Otherwise, anarchy and chaos reign.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...6b1_story.html

In some, but not all, cases, the established system is so entrenched and the beneficiaries of the system so powerful that an orderly transition from the old system to the new isn't possible. As with the American Revolution, the old system became an insurmountable obstacle in the path to a new system. This leaves only two alternatives: either you wait for the old system to destroy itself, a process that took 200 years post revolution for the British empire, or you overthrow the system by any available means. Only then can you begin to put a new system in its place.

The Post article neglects to mention that out first go, the Articles of Confederation, was a bust and that we had to scrap it and start over in 1787. The Constitution, adopted 2 years later, was our second try and it failed to prevent the crisis our country faced 70 years later.

Yeh, it's worked out really well in the Mideast and Russia and it remains to be seen how the transition in the UK goes now that they've bought a pig in a poke.

What may be preferable isn't always possible.

See my late edit.

And Russia is still around 100 years later. China too.

'Destroying the old system' is not what got us to the moon.

Pol Pots revolution worked out poorly, and he did think he had a plan.

Question # 1 from Pio, was 'is a sustainable strategy achieveable?' The question assumes a sustainable strategy exists, and let's make that assumption for now. Let's say it's mainly a matter of getting investment in the right things. How can that be done?

The Apollo Program didn't require instituting an entirely new economic system. It existed within and was an integral part of the whole pre-neoliberal system. And look what has happened to NASA since Reagan. Your Apollo Program metaphor is inapt, not revolutionary enough for the current situation.

A bit overwrought, don't you think?

Personal investment or financial investment?

Pig in a poke/puss in a bag is not really applicable here. The people of England and Wales saw the depression of wages, their working class jobs advertised in Eastern Europe, the pressure on housing and the increase competition for scarce benefits brought on by very large influx of migrants coming from EU countries with lower standard of living and much lower levels of wages.

So they know things were going to get worse with Ukrainians and Turks around the corner and they wanted to have some say in the process.

Therefore the situation was not opaque, it was and is a clear and transparent one...no puss in a bag...no pig in a poke.

The first thing that will need to be addressed is that, as population increases and technology accelerates, we will reach, have reached?, a point where there won't be enough jobs to go around. We are entering a "workerless age" where blue collar jobs are done by robots and white collar jobs by artificially intelligent computers. This will happen, perhaps sooner than we think, and we have to start thinking about ways to deal with the social and financial dislocations it will cause.

Did the Apollo program produce a sustainable result? Could it have?

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You're talking violent revolution, and you say I'm overwrought?

Investment. Period.

Apollo, no. The ability to work in orbit pioneered by Apollo? Possibly.

I remain interested in solar power satellites.

I'm not talking about executing everyone who wears glasses.

And I'm not endorsing the idea of violent revolution, just saying that what you're after usually requires one, not a big government program like Apollo or the Manhattan project.

So how about addressing some of my other points?

This is a very relevant issue. A workerless age risks being a 'demandless age,' in terms of the classic consumer-demand driven economy. Even worse, what I see of populations denied work suggests a pretty dsytopian future.

Appreciate the clarification regarding revolution. Agrarian to industrial happened without revolution. Oh there were revolutions, but the revolutionaries did not make the farm to industry transition happen (except perhaps in Russia/China, and the was megadeath involved with them....).

I am not a fan of revolution. Revolutionaries seem to go for absolute power, and there are big drawbacks to that.

The industrial revolution didn't result in the elimination of agriculture. Though the Russian Revolution resulted in the death or deportation of many, many people, notable the Kulaks, these atrocities were related to the collectivization of agricultural production, not it's elimination. The revolution I foresee most definitely involves the death of the capitalist system. That will be violently resisted.

Ours never underwent a totalitarian period and after "The Terror", a period of less than a year, France's didn't either.

There will always be demand as long as there's such a thing as personal wealth. A workerless economy will still make things so it's in everyone's interest that the demand for products and services is maintained.

Enter guaranteed minimum income. Each of us would have to be guaranteed an income that was 1) divorced from the need to work and 2) sufficient to guarantee a good quality of life and the ability to consume the products and services of out economies.

The relative few of us who would work at tasks not yet within the capabilities of computers and robots would of course be compensated as would artist, writers, musicians, scientists, etc. They would form an intellectual elite wherein creativity and innovations in thought and technology would be venerated.

Historically this is usually how it plays out. Uprisings rarely have planned that far ahead.

Sustainable strategy IMO only works in Star trek movies. Greed has a way of perverting even the best intentions.

Indeed. Man needs something constructive to occupy his time, otherwise he become destructive.

Talk of a completely new economic system seems a bit absurd considering that even the modest proposals of Bernie Sanders were rejected as too extreme.

How we get from here to there is a further question.

Like, it's not easy to hike from Tuscaloosa to Tacoma, but if you don't know you're aiming for Tacoma the thing becomes really unlikely.

It occurs to me that the fundemental question here is one of philosophy. Economics makes a fetish of it's graphs and things, and likes to makes like it's just super-accounting, but I think at base it is philosophy--indeed, it is where modern philosophy is done--thus the irrelevance of the guys now called philosophers.

There are lots of byways where philosophy gets bogged-down, but the big question always has been and is 'How should people live? What the right way to arrange everything?' So who answers this for us these days? Economics, in particular the now-ascendant neoliberal economics. And the school answer is thus 'everything should be arranged so that activity takes place through people organized in private firms that compete in free markets.' The market, in this philosophy, is the measure of all things. Profit is what is good. Loss is what is bad. And taxation and regulation are sinful things that distort the market's all-righteous workings.

It's a rather amoral philosophy--success in the market justifies, or excuses, just about anything. It's rules thus allow it to be a deceitful philosophy, that actively seeks in recent years to hide that it even is a philosophy. This explains why modern neoliberals have stopped calling themselves neoliberals.

I think before we plan to launch solar power satellites or develop renewable biomass energy, we need to develop an overarching philosophy. The one measure of value now is the accrual of private assets in a market economy. Shall we not assert the primacy of values that are now devalued? Which one or ones should be central?

The core of neoliberalism is the commodification of everything. If it exists, it can be bought and sold, including, in some important ways, human beings. This is ideology, not philosophy and is so toxic that it must be done away with, utterly and permanently. It's beneficiaries will resist with all the power of the institutions and governments they control.

Which Countries Are Best At Converting National Wealth Into Well-Being http://n.pr/2avE9gS

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Very on-point, Pio. I want to dig further into the measures of well-being they are using. They are very correct that national income, by itself, isn't it.

nice exchange

somethings to ponder

thanks!