Comment on It's been downhill since 2020
staph@sopuli.xyz 6 days agoAt this point, anything remotely near bare-metal material reality triggers such a cognitive dissonance in a lot of folks, on account of all of the bs they have in their heads, that all of that bare-metal material reality is discarded as too painful.
outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
I know it’s cliche, but i think capitalism deserves a lot of the blame.
hector@lemmy.today 6 days ago
What we have now is capitalism, but it is other things as well. Some say late stage capitalism. It is a plutocracy. It is becoming even more of a kakistocracy, rule of the worst. It was borderline fascist and now becoming moreso.
We had capitalism in the 1950s through the 1970s, and we had a pretty prosperous society, for whatever faults the system had, anybody with a job could live a decent life, which is the overriding concern of everybody, not living in destitute poverty.
They have changed the way inflation is measured a number of times to understate it, and now we are compound fucked by 50 years.
Social Security checks would have been worth $1,200 more on average a month just in 2008 under the unchanged standard. We are getting robbed everyday by inflation and we believe the ivy league suits on TV that tell us our wages have never had more buying power.
outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
Weird, because in china they call what we had in the 50s communism (it’s what they’re doing now). They’re not more or less correct than you are.
Tgough i should note thatvwhat youre saying is true for white men.
The concept of ownership being valued over labor snd basing our economy on a nonsense points system we equate with virtue is a bigger problem
hector@lemmy.today 6 days ago
The minimum wage applied to everybody outside of agricultural work. So the minorities that did not share in an exalted social status, still had enough money to live a dignified life.
I specifically addressed that so I would not have somebody discounting the lessons from the post-war era because not everything was perfect. It’s not perfect now either by the way, so you can discount everything from today or any period in time with that logic.
We are being robbed and you are addressing some abstract concept, and not the means by which we have been robbed. Inflation is a real measured thing we could reset our wages and raises on. I think you are wrong headed on all of your points here.
Capital being valued over labor is not mutually exclusive with addressing us being robbed by dishonest numbers.
staph@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
Sure, but I’d wager it goes beyond the singular manifestation of power as money. Plenty of other manifestations, and all lead to similar places.
outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
Its not about the money directly, it’s about the alienation from things like labor and value, plus absolutely insane shit people need to believe to feel okay with it.