It's funny to me that 1% of poor people is "corruption we need to root out" but having worthless billionaires pay less tax than a school teacher is well and good.
If we're going to work out corruption, let's take everything the billionaires have and actually fix some of our systems.
There's no reason we should pay 2x what everyone else does, and live 10 years less (for healthcare).
We could accept a good deal of socialism into our system and see only benefits; there are a number of things which should not be profit-motive driven at all.
Most of the basic medical research is funded by tax dollars.
Also, are you sure the bureaucracy isn't exactly the point? If you're too sick to fight off a denial and die, they keep the money.
I think we're subsidizing Wall Street's profits with our garbage system, but the sooner people realize our system is totally failed maybe we can knock it down and do something else.
I suggest doing some reading about labor movements, the Gilded Age, or about current issues - wealth inequality, housing costs, environmental impact, healthcare costs, enshittification.
The free market has failed miserably across multiple dimensions - even Trump has the government owning companies now (Intel). The “free market” has been a failed idea for a long time.
> In tribes in the olden days, when a person got sick/too old, many tribes just left him to die, because they couldn't afford to feed him.
We have archeological evidence that contradicts this directly! What are you even talking about?
This isn’t a good way to structure a society, but your whole point about mixing morality with capitalism is perhaps the worst one.
If you can’t look at the damage to people (and the environment) under our current system and point out how it is broadly immoral, I would suggest taking a closer look at the very least.
I've read a lot and I have been in the buisness since I was 21 years old, almost homeless student in a big city that had to postpone my degree to survive so I've had years to think from the both sides of the "inequality" divide and I got a degree in economics.
You assume that if there is a price on it than there is a free market for it. It's not true at all...
Compare the freedom of the markets that are inefficient in your example:
- housing: one of the most regulated and non-transparent markets with zoning laws and NIMBYism blocking new supply to the market
- healthcare: even more regulated market for practitioners (licence to heal), medical supplies (licences for medicines) and a brocken system that incumbents can't enter (check cost+drugs Mark Cuban's post about how shitty the system is and how far away from normal free market)
- enivronmental impact: that's what the taxes are for and to have a good tax base you tax the polutants, but it's not "the market" it's "the people who consume" in any market free or not you'll get the resources used. In non-free markets you will just use more resources, because the encumbents will extract +400$ for 8Gb ram upgrade of your macbook pro or 10000 USD for a broken leg, that could've done much more if it wasn't inefficiently extorted.
- enshittification: this happens only in the "ecosystems" with no markets inside.
If you go to the freeer markets you'll see that the prices got down, not up. (check the price of computers, electronics and clothes for example).
There are some areas where the market is not the answer, but there humanity hasn't found a better way to optimize resources and ensure freedom unless the people have the ability to change their goods freely without restriction of the third party.
If our markets weren’t corrupt, everyone in the AI space would be bankrupt by now, and we could all wander down to the OpenAI fire sale and buy nice servers for pennies on the dollar.
I'd take this more seriously if I didn't hear the same thing every other time there was a spike in VC investment. The last 5 times were the next dot com booms too.
The side that thinks vaccines are a hoax, RFK Jr discovered the cause of autism, wants to burn up satellites we’ve already paid for because the carbon numbers are bad, suggested injecting bleach (remember that?), stared at the solar eclipse, constantly makes noise about how women should have fewer rights and maybe the 10 commandments belong in school… are not who you want in charge of science funding. Obviously.
Remember the sharpie path of the hurricane? No need for a supercomputer, we’ve got sharpie.
Team “windmills cause cancer” obviously isn’t better for science, get real.
If we’re using the federal government to shut down comedians, I think we have more in common with China/Russia/N. Korea? Especially when you consider illegally using the military to murder boats full of civilians, and banishment (not deportation) to random places.
Since the left has moved so far left, and Trump is closer to historical center, I believe the West is now closer to what it's been from a historical perspective.
I'd agree that the FCC's threat exceeded their authority. But between Kimmel's factually-stated (and sick) assertion, which opens ABC/Disney to defamation claims, and massive public and affiliate backlash, ABC faced concrete distribution risk, hence placing him on indefinite leave (not fired).
The techno-libertarians I’ve interacted with were always painfully naive, with a simplistic worldview (that they thought was extremely learn’ed - mistaking their technical skill for broad intellect that understood politics to be “simple”).
If they haven’t grown up thus far, I doubt yet another logical inconsistency will puncture their shallow and hermetic understanding.
Or as I read it somewhere, “We’ve created a group of technical people who can solve any technical problem but can’t explain why Nazism is bad.”
The only thing that might pierce that veil is this: they believed they were not workers, but more like a priestly class, “self made” but immune to the travails of “everyone else”. The massive spike in layoffs, the economic slump, our increased taxes (via tariff), the rights erosions - might get them to recognize their mistake in understanding, but only if it strikes them personally (this gets back to the naïveté mentioned above).
As we’ve learned from victims of pig butchering scams, denial of the obvious runs very, very deep. Pride and confidence and lack of self reflection will make it very difficult for Trump voters to change their minds.
We don’t have a moral or civil society anyway; we can’t even prosecute Trumps numerous illegal actions (even when convicted!). Can’t get the Epstein files. Can’t even point out Charlie Kirk was not a great person (while politicians said nothing about the school shooting the same day), and where it’s legal to kill 40,000 of us a year due to poor medical coverage so we can prop up the stock.
I’m not sure, given the moral dystopia we currently inhabit, what positive benefit would accrue from removing online anonymity?
Didn’t the President of the United States say he didn’t care about bringing the people together, and has wished violence upon people who don’t support him politically?
Where do you think this comes from, and, rather than arm ourselves with similarly martial language, we should be expected simply to lie flat?
Such a powerful message Trump sent when the very first thing he did in January after the inauguration was to pardon the people who tried to murder his vice president and did beat cops with an American flag. He pardoned people convicted in a court of law of seditious conspiracy against the United states. That was a permission slip.
So I agree, there's a direct line from the political violence on J6, to the political violence we see today. If there is any lingering doubt, the the message from the President is clear: he literally said he doesn't consider violence from the right to be a problem. Right wing extremists are just people trying to reduce what they see as crime, according to him.
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