“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”
They aren’t laissez-faire, they just want slightly different types of control. Deregulating a group and adding some subsidies is just a different way to reward your buddies, but neither is representative of a free market.
I’m not sure how you guys view regulation as a whole, but an inordinate amount of it exists to help corps rather than us.
That is because ‘laissez-faire markets’ under capitalism have never been a thing. And that is besides the fact that historically speaking, ‘laissez-faire markets’ without capitalism or governments to control them are less of a market and more of a system of reciprocity, that doesn’t value the maximization of profit. Markets are mostly imposed, not evolved.
It is incredible to me that this particular nugget of propaganda “That capitalists like competition and laissez-faire markets.” from french liberals has continued into the modern day with such a strength that even supposed leftists pay lip service to it as if holds any kind of reality. What makes the capitalist formation superior to the feudal model is that the concentrations of productive capital and labor are larger, and more directly focused on the development of that productive capital and labor, as opposed to cultural capital or power over individual workers, in particular the decoupling of people from the land and into fully labor-value and market-intensive methods of living. It’s never been because of ‘competition’ or ‘laissez-faire markets’.
And in that instance, this is, of course, more of the same capitalist schtick as always. This is just Reagan again, who is just Coolidge again, etc. It would be more surprising (and actually unprecedented) if Elon was actually implementing efficiency without reducing output, and implementing laissez-faire economic policies.
You leave my boi Bastiat alone. His views on rights are what allowed me to be led me out of a strict propertarian mindset. There’s always a ‘but’ in reactionary rights analysis that fucks them out of not just funneling money up to capitalist or political classes.
I originally come from a right-libertarian (ancap) background with personal ethics much closer to the left. Still feels awkward admitting I’m just a weird left anarchist of some sort.
Any honest analysis of our system based on individual rights should agree with most of your conclusions, even without the left analysis. You can’t have laissez-faire markets in an economy tuned towards capital accumulation. You also can’t do much by shooting a single CEO in a system tuned to turning people into sociopaths while calling it career advancement.
Elon might do some good with the USAID shit, but only unintentionally. It’s hard to tell what’s humanitarian aid and what $50m USD for condoms is just CIA money laundering imperial shit.
I’m rambling now.
If you have been watching what Elon is doing with the USAID, it is not getting rid of it, it is placing it and what it does more directly under the executive branch’s control and purview. As some would say, ‘taking off the mask’. This is of course, because he is too stupid to understand how politically useful having NGO slight-of-hand is for the U.S.
It does make sense if you believe the era of U.S. soft-power domination is completely over (or is in-efficient/woke/ineffective, take your pick of the buzzwords). What we are seeing is a complete buy-in on traditional fascist ‘efficiency’ propaganda, without the savvy that the neo-liberal post-fascists displayed in earlier times. As far as I can tell the belief is that the facade costs money and has no benefits so it must be discarded. No good will come of it, but it was no good to begin with.
It’s just fascists shooting themselves in the foot because they don’t actually understand where modern fascism gets it’s power and stability from, the obfuscation of power. They seem to have this deep need to not just be recognized as powerful by the silent elite, but to be seen as powerful by people on social media platforms (who they likely see as ‘the masses’). The follow-up question is if they will try to run with the old fascist ‘clash of civilizations’ narrative after shooting themselves in the foot, or if they will just content themselves with just fucking things up for workers and bullying their reluctant allies. It is unclear at this point.
Trying to take it over is at least fucking with the establishment. I’d rather them waste political power going tit for tat than fucking us.
lawfare, regulatory capture, monopolies, proprietary lock-in, planned obsolescence are all attempts to cope with the tendency of the rate of profit to decline
this is another reason a large portion of the US economy is now the trading of financial assets and services associated with trading, doing actual production is much more difficult to keep profitable
There’s a reason it’s somehow profitable to have trees of businesses larger than some cities when nobody in any of that structure makes a fucking thing.
I’d be interested in seeing what things would look like if we didn’t let people offload liability to society.
I think workers owning their means of production is about as short as you can make that line of connection
capitalism is based in the abstraction and obfuscation of that line of connection
That is the shortest chain and ultimate goal. Peeps can group up, but still have to be able to handle the risk they take on. Once people become chess pieces or statistics in an org there’s no way for a human to consider them as individuals, regardless of that person’s psychology - the structures we have turn good people into monsters as surely as religious zealotry.