Unfortunately, from what I've seen the only candidates who seem legitimately interested in solving the problem don't stand a chance of getting elected, because they don't belong to either of the major parties.
I don't think capital naturally accrues capital. Look at any country that experimented with "land reform", i.e. taking land from capitalists and distributing it to the workers. I'll save you the wikipedia read. Production collapses, less is sold, less is earned, people become poorer. Capital is destroyed.
That's not true? The US dispossessed Native Americans of their land and dramatically increased agricultural production. The UK went through massive land ownership changes as a result of the Black Death and dramatically increased production after the fact. China went through massive land dispossesion and produces more than it ever has. Same with the Netherlands.
> I don't think capital naturally accrues capital.
It depends on the monetary system. Those monetary systems that mostly accompanied capitalism have a feature that leads to this capital accumulation effect: interest/debt.
Financial capital is kept in banks, which deposit it at their central bank. There it naturally accrues more capital due to interest. (Except in exceptional circumstances like the Swiss negative interest period)
But still, lots of lenders go bust. Lots of loans end up non-performing. Interest isn't a free money loophole, it's profit in exchange for risk.
Presently, the safety of bank deposits are in most countries guaranteed by the government, but before this they weren't risk free either. That's why bank runs happened. People panicked to get their capital out before it was gone.
In the private market: yes the interest is a compensation for the risk taken by the lender.
However certain institutions like banks have access to so called "risk free" lending. They can (must) deposit capital at the central bank and get paid interest. In the US this would be the "interest on reserve balances" or through reverse repo transactions, where the FED pays the interest.
From the point of view of the bank (inside a financial system) this is risk free profit.
No it doesn't, regardless of which monetary system you can invest resources to make more resources. Communists also does this, tribes also does this, everyone does this, having more lets you invest to get even more.
Yeah I can see how this leaves a bad taste. A few bullets I found interesting while looking into this:
1. It was repealed in (also the Biden admin's) IRA about a year later
2. The argument for special programs for racial minority farmers is that only 1% of COVID aid for farmers went to minority farmers, largely because such aid was dolled out based on existing holdings/historical output. Minority farmers have been excluded from USDA development programs for generations now, so their holdings/output left them unable to benefit from from the COVID aid
Altogether seems like a reasonable problem to try to solve, but not a good way to solve it, and it's good that it got repealed ~14 months later for a race-blind version of the same program.
There is always nuance, but that never matters because the headline is all people see and that makes them angry. “Help for 1% of minority farmers” isn’t as juicy and doesn’t further an agenda.
1. Seattle: The training was optional. Seems not that crazy to offer?
2. Pennsylvania: There are all sorts of programs designed to combat specific problems -- in this case the program was designed to counteract the fact that certain racial groups have been excluded from financial services for a long time. Would you characterize an aid program that only serves veterans to be discriminatory against non-veterans?
3. FAA: You should probably not cite an op-ed as a source, let me know if you'd like to provide another
> The training was optional. Seems not that crazy to offer?
Crazy or not, if someone starts giving training on how you, specifically can try to be less of a monster, it's reasonable to assume that someone doesn't like you very much.
> You should probably not cite an op-ed as a source
Oh, this doesn't count as "combating a specific problem"? Diversity is so great it must be mandatory?
Anyway sure you can keep trying to explain this obvious trend away with sophistry, but don't be surprised when others don't stick their heads in the sand with the same enthusiasm as you.
You don't know what an op-ed is, do you? Look it up! Here, you can type this into your favorite LLM:
"what's the difference between an article published by Wall Street Journal and an op-ed published by Wall Street Journal in terms of their expected journalistic quality?"
Re the training: did it have anything to do with being a monster, or was it about identifying and counteracting subconscious biases?
Do you think subconscious biases don't exist? Do you think having them intrinsically makes you a monster?
Re the white-only towns: nobody said diversity is mandatory. Where are you getting that idea?
Don't worry, despite the political climate today, people bummed out about the difficulty of creating whites-only towns are few and far between. In a few years you'll be ashamed of your views just like you were a few years ago, and as you should be.
I'm sure I don't have to explain that racial discrimination in housing is illegal under civil rights law. So it's "not mandatory", just doing anything to directly avoid it is illegal. Anyway this is all the tactical ignorance I'm willing to suffer - goodbye.
"Of course salt water isn't mandatory! You're just not allowed to stop the salt trucks when they come to salt your fresh water. If no trucks come on their own, the government will hire some [1]."
He chose what to cite, and there's a reason he chose the figure that can most easily be massaged by picking and choosing what counts as terrorism and what doesn't, vs. something objective, like homicide rates.
Probably because homicide rates have been going down for decades (with a slight COVID bump which has since diminished) while domestic terrorism rates have been going up for the last several years.
I think it's clear based on your advocacy for a whites-only town what you're trying to get at here, but the data doesn't bear it out. Homicide isn't a growing emergency. Domestic terrorism is. That's why the FBI focused on it.
@g0rk why is terrorism considered so bad even though in absolute terms the number of deaths is far below accepted things like homicides, car crashes, or even falling down stairwells?
Oh they could probably swallow one specific program. The problem is that entire side of the political spectrum (not just the Democratic party itself) considers them somewhere between second-class citizen or outright enemy. Another example:
As a straight, white, male I don't really feel that I'm a second-class citizen nor the enemy. Have you considered getting off Twitter for a while?
It's not clear to me the federal judiciary should match the composition of the population of lawyers as opposed to the composition of the people whom they judge.
In fact as you can see here, Obama appointed people largely similar to what you'd expect to see in the population (without bothering to look into specific geographies). It was Trump who was wildly aberrational. In fact even more aberrational than Biden, who at least has the believable rationale of trying to rebalance the courts after Trump took such a pro-male (76%!!) and pro-white (85%!!) approach.
For context, the US is <50% male, and about 60% white.
It’s just a natural side effect of state capitalism. When you constantly mix government with business you almost always get a government that props up large old companies and then those businesses directly fund the politicians to back them. National security is then used as a sales pitch to justify helping the big companies when normally it’d be a social angle for smaller ones (or a social angle for internal big company policies).
The less government is in the business of subsidies, special tax carveouts, and bailouts the less it happens. Likewise with regulations and IP laws that are often designed by the top companies in their favour.
I have a feeling CHIPS is going to a classic example in retrospect, a wealth transfer to stodgy oligopolies, not about market development. Likewise with inventing AI regulations in an immature market before the risks are fully understood.
