sj_zero on Nostr: We live in an era where the word "austerity" is meaningless. It's a red herring. 120 ...
We live in an era where the word "austerity" is meaningless. It's a red herring.
120 years ago, the government made up a single digit percent of GDP. In many countries today, that number is 30, 40, 50%.
If your government makes up half of the economy, you're in an era of functional fascism. The government becomes totalizing, it controls way more than 30, 40, 50% of the economy at that point because when you're in bed with an elephant you lay where it lets you, not where you want to lay.
Next, there's the fact that people who want to keep all the government we have don't want to pay for all the government we have. If you take out huge amounts of debt you never intend to pay back so you can hand yourself money, that's morally bankrupt -- selling kids into slavery is morally wrong, and that's a hill I'm willing to die on.
Not that it's necessarily the relevant discussion anyway. From a class standpoint, government is filled with the bougoisie, people whose job is to sit at a desk extracting value from the working class to fund their lifestyles. As we're learning more and more, the government gets captured by corruption, and so you end up giving government money to rich people, who then use that money to give to government officials in legal or illegal ways. The powerful help the powerful. The fact that they're powerful through the market or powerful through the state becomes irrelevant. The postmodern "city people" (the etymological basis of the phrase "Bougoisie") is
In this way, austerity becomes a red herring -- the government in most countries has virtually never meaningfully shrunk. The only thing is they stop giving tax money to needy people and reroute it to the powerful. Same amount of money spent, but homeless camps spring up everywhere because the common man is drained, their kids are drained, and get nothing meaningful in return.
When governments claim they're going to spend more money, what it really means is, they're going to spend more money on themselves and their buddies. The United States spends as much public money on healthcare as Canada (actually much more at the moment), but Canada has single payer healthcare, the United States basically requires everyone to buy private health insurance because there is no universal healthcare for people, just for the rich and their bank accounts.
120 years ago, the government made up a single digit percent of GDP. In many countries today, that number is 30, 40, 50%.
If your government makes up half of the economy, you're in an era of functional fascism. The government becomes totalizing, it controls way more than 30, 40, 50% of the economy at that point because when you're in bed with an elephant you lay where it lets you, not where you want to lay.
Next, there's the fact that people who want to keep all the government we have don't want to pay for all the government we have. If you take out huge amounts of debt you never intend to pay back so you can hand yourself money, that's morally bankrupt -- selling kids into slavery is morally wrong, and that's a hill I'm willing to die on.
Not that it's necessarily the relevant discussion anyway. From a class standpoint, government is filled with the bougoisie, people whose job is to sit at a desk extracting value from the working class to fund their lifestyles. As we're learning more and more, the government gets captured by corruption, and so you end up giving government money to rich people, who then use that money to give to government officials in legal or illegal ways. The powerful help the powerful. The fact that they're powerful through the market or powerful through the state becomes irrelevant. The postmodern "city people" (the etymological basis of the phrase "Bougoisie") is
In this way, austerity becomes a red herring -- the government in most countries has virtually never meaningfully shrunk. The only thing is they stop giving tax money to needy people and reroute it to the powerful. Same amount of money spent, but homeless camps spring up everywhere because the common man is drained, their kids are drained, and get nothing meaningful in return.
When governments claim they're going to spend more money, what it really means is, they're going to spend more money on themselves and their buddies. The United States spends as much public money on healthcare as Canada (actually much more at the moment), but Canada has single payer healthcare, the United States basically requires everyone to buy private health insurance because there is no universal healthcare for people, just for the rich and their bank accounts.