Whenever a politician appears on TV, or in the newspaper, or in advertisements beamed directly into our brains (they're working on it), they always have that little parenthetical letter after their name. R - Republican. D-Democrat. I-Independent. L-Lol, like anyone would vote for something out of R&D.
Why is this? We've pigeonholed ourselves into an electoral system in which party is the only significant factor. Or at least, it's the most significant factor. That's terrible. I can't imagine how many people watch a political ad, see the letter, and then tune out everything else as if it were the teacher from Peanuts talking, having already made their decision based on that single character.
Why do we even have candidates anymore? Just have a sign that says, "Vote R!" Or "Vote D!" That's what people are doing anyway, and then they could just fill the slot with whomever they please afterward. Joe the Plumber could be our next congressman. Or Phil from accounts receivable. You don't know who these people are, but that's not important because you know what letter they wear.
I say take the letters out. Force people to actually engage their higher cognitive functions - assuming they still can - and make them figure out which party the candidate belongs to based on what they say in their ads. Or better yet, maybe they'll just be able to determine if they like the candidate or not, regardless of party. It sure would get people to put a little bit more thought into their votes, and while it might scare some folks off who can't be bothered to work things out for themselves, are those really the kind of people we want voting in the first place?
I'm Illjwamh (A), and I approve this message.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Why is "class warfare" a bad thing?
Okay, I'm going to start this one off with a quandary. What exactly is "class warfare" anyway? The media would have you believe that it is something akin to poorer, working class people lashing out against the wealthy for various and typically obvious reasons. Terms like "the politics of envy" get thrown around a lot. There's a sense that the well-off are being treated unfairly, and that to attack them simply for being financially successful is wrong.
Let's accept that as the case. In other words, take everything I said after "the media would have you believe" and just assume that it's true. Why? Because it pretty much is. But now we come to my biggest question, and the one I'm going to be talking about for much of the rest of this...whatever this is: Why is that bad?
Seriously, now. The poor people are upset that they aren't rich. Okay, that one pretty much makes sense. They are upset that rich people are rich when they are not. That one's a gross oversimplification and it's one that's used with alarming frequency by those crying victim in this whole mess, i.e. the rich.
Take that last bit and think about it for a moment. The rich...are the victims. Already this isn't making any sense. If you are wealthy then you are pretty much by definition not a victim unless someone is breaking into your giant house and stealing all of your expensive shit. So how then is this idea propagated? Simple: the rich people own the means of information distribution. Media companies, news organizations, they're all owned by rich people. Rich people who have a vested interest in continuing to be rich people. "We are being attacked," they tell us. "It's all these envious poor people trying to steal our hard-earned wealth and distribute it amongst themselves."
Another thing wrong with that, which I'll deal with before continuing: the idea that all wealthy people earned their wealth through hard work is a myth. I know it's the trendy thing to say "I built that!", but that's not always the case. I'm not saying there aren't people out there like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and whatnot who legitimately came up with billion-dollar ideas and executed them effectively. But for every one of them, there are a dozen worthless brats with trust funds, building an empire of success by investing inherited money into bubble economies that can never last, lining their own pockets and then bailing out when it pops on the general public. These economic parasites do little more than move money around, they produce nothing and contribute almost nothing to society, and dodge taxes in every way they can in order to hang on to even more of it. And, if that's not enough, two words: Paris Hilton.
Again, I'm not saying there aren't responsible businesspeople who build up success for themselves and others alike. That does happen. In fact, the very fact that it does happen is where a lot of this politics of envy stuff comes from. The irresponsible people who are in it only to make a buck are always so quick to point to the responsible ones as if they're the universal standard. And really, that's unfair to the responsible ones because if everyone behaved like they do, class warfare wouldn't even be an issue. Warren Buffet is a perfect example. He is one of the wealthiest men on the planet, yet is one of the staunchest supporters of social responsibility. So no, rich people are not inherently bad and this is not an indictment of the wealthy rooted in my vile and seething envy of them. I sure as hell know I'd like to be rich. Who wouldn't? I'd like to be so rich that the rich people of today will think I have too much money. But if that ever happened, I wouldn't suddenly decide that it's okay for me to treat people like pawns in my never-ending quest to become even richer. I'd like to think I could be like Mr. Buffet, or any of the other millionaires/billionaires who accept their position in society with a healthy dose of humility.
On the opposite end of the spectrum from these folks, you have the myriad investors, bankers and buisnesspeople who created the real-estate bubble. Investing in bad mortgages - that they knew were bad - simply because it was making them a lot of money in the short term. It was legal, but anyone with even the most basic understanding of economics should have known that it was unsustainable, not to mention the moral and ethical implications. And yet with disturbing regularity, people like these are the "job-creators" that are being oppressed by the 99%.
They say they're creating jobs, but even in the rare cases they actually do, it's generally not in America. Outsourcing is more cost-effective so that's what they do. They oppose every measure of regulation designed to protect American workers. They lobby against things like minimum wage, lower working hours and paid vacation. They do all of this in a concerted effort to make more money for themselves while paying as little as possible to the rest of us, and yet it's "class warfare" to denounce them for doing it.
Let me tell you something, folks: if it weren't for "class warfare", then we wouldn't have so many of the things we have today. Minimum wage? Forget about it. Eight hour days? Don't be ridiculous. Weekends off? Not if you want to keep your job. In China, at the now-infamous Foxconn plant and countless others like it, employees are housed on company-owned land. They eat at a company cafeteria and purchase clothing and essentials from a company store. These things cost more than they earn in wages, so they have to take out loans from the company and continue working there in order to pay it off. Sound horrifying? Before "class warfare" and all those horrible socialist regulations, that's exactly how things were in the United States barely a century ago. Ever heard the phrase "Sold my soul to the company store"? That's where that came from.
I say class warfare needs a rebranding. "Warfare" sounds so negative - and that's not a coincidence, by the way. The term was coined by the very people trying to portray it as a negative thing. "Social Justice" has been bandied around, but it too has acquired some negative connotations and its true meaning can be rather ambiguous. Let's go for the more denotative expression of "Social Responsibility". There is still some room for interpretation here, but there's a lot less ambiguity and it certainly sounds like something we should be doing.
To start with, just because a person is wealthy does not somehow grant them greater value as a human being. How can a society that condemns feudal serfdom simultaneously denounce class war? It makes no sense. And the worst part is, the "victims" have, with their great power and influence, managed to somehow convince the real victims - the lower-middle class and the working poor - to support the wrong side. They do this through clever emotional manipulation and overuse of the phrase "American Dream". After all, everyone wants to achieve the American Dream, right? "Why should I demand more concessions from the wealthy?" You might say. "I could be rich myself someday, and then that would be really inconvenient!"
The rich can afford to support this idea because they know it will never come true, and yet they know everyone harbors the hope that it will. They know it won't come true for the same reason the rest of us do: everyone can't be rich, because if we were, who would greet us at Wal-Mart? Yet hope is a powerful thing. This strategy has been used by those in power to manipulate the masses since time immemorial. When Odysseus proposed his strategy for settling the suitor debate over Helen (later of Troy) - that all suitors would agree to abide by the decision and pledge to defend it should the need ever arise - they all agreed in the vain hope that they would be the ones chosen, even though the odds were astronomically against them. That same principle is used today: by dangling the American Dream in front of their noses, we can get a remarkable number of people to go against their own interests because they're all hoping they'll be the one to magically benefit from it someday.
Let's accept that as the case. In other words, take everything I said after "the media would have you believe" and just assume that it's true. Why? Because it pretty much is. But now we come to my biggest question, and the one I'm going to be talking about for much of the rest of this...whatever this is: Why is that bad?
Seriously, now. The poor people are upset that they aren't rich. Okay, that one pretty much makes sense. They are upset that rich people are rich when they are not. That one's a gross oversimplification and it's one that's used with alarming frequency by those crying victim in this whole mess, i.e. the rich.
Take that last bit and think about it for a moment. The rich...are the victims. Already this isn't making any sense. If you are wealthy then you are pretty much by definition not a victim unless someone is breaking into your giant house and stealing all of your expensive shit. So how then is this idea propagated? Simple: the rich people own the means of information distribution. Media companies, news organizations, they're all owned by rich people. Rich people who have a vested interest in continuing to be rich people. "We are being attacked," they tell us. "It's all these envious poor people trying to steal our hard-earned wealth and distribute it amongst themselves."
Another thing wrong with that, which I'll deal with before continuing: the idea that all wealthy people earned their wealth through hard work is a myth. I know it's the trendy thing to say "I built that!", but that's not always the case. I'm not saying there aren't people out there like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and whatnot who legitimately came up with billion-dollar ideas and executed them effectively. But for every one of them, there are a dozen worthless brats with trust funds, building an empire of success by investing inherited money into bubble economies that can never last, lining their own pockets and then bailing out when it pops on the general public. These economic parasites do little more than move money around, they produce nothing and contribute almost nothing to society, and dodge taxes in every way they can in order to hang on to even more of it. And, if that's not enough, two words: Paris Hilton.
Again, I'm not saying there aren't responsible businesspeople who build up success for themselves and others alike. That does happen. In fact, the very fact that it does happen is where a lot of this politics of envy stuff comes from. The irresponsible people who are in it only to make a buck are always so quick to point to the responsible ones as if they're the universal standard. And really, that's unfair to the responsible ones because if everyone behaved like they do, class warfare wouldn't even be an issue. Warren Buffet is a perfect example. He is one of the wealthiest men on the planet, yet is one of the staunchest supporters of social responsibility. So no, rich people are not inherently bad and this is not an indictment of the wealthy rooted in my vile and seething envy of them. I sure as hell know I'd like to be rich. Who wouldn't? I'd like to be so rich that the rich people of today will think I have too much money. But if that ever happened, I wouldn't suddenly decide that it's okay for me to treat people like pawns in my never-ending quest to become even richer. I'd like to think I could be like Mr. Buffet, or any of the other millionaires/billionaires who accept their position in society with a healthy dose of humility.
On the opposite end of the spectrum from these folks, you have the myriad investors, bankers and buisnesspeople who created the real-estate bubble. Investing in bad mortgages - that they knew were bad - simply because it was making them a lot of money in the short term. It was legal, but anyone with even the most basic understanding of economics should have known that it was unsustainable, not to mention the moral and ethical implications. And yet with disturbing regularity, people like these are the "job-creators" that are being oppressed by the 99%.
They say they're creating jobs, but even in the rare cases they actually do, it's generally not in America. Outsourcing is more cost-effective so that's what they do. They oppose every measure of regulation designed to protect American workers. They lobby against things like minimum wage, lower working hours and paid vacation. They do all of this in a concerted effort to make more money for themselves while paying as little as possible to the rest of us, and yet it's "class warfare" to denounce them for doing it.
Let me tell you something, folks: if it weren't for "class warfare", then we wouldn't have so many of the things we have today. Minimum wage? Forget about it. Eight hour days? Don't be ridiculous. Weekends off? Not if you want to keep your job. In China, at the now-infamous Foxconn plant and countless others like it, employees are housed on company-owned land. They eat at a company cafeteria and purchase clothing and essentials from a company store. These things cost more than they earn in wages, so they have to take out loans from the company and continue working there in order to pay it off. Sound horrifying? Before "class warfare" and all those horrible socialist regulations, that's exactly how things were in the United States barely a century ago. Ever heard the phrase "Sold my soul to the company store"? That's where that came from.
I say class warfare needs a rebranding. "Warfare" sounds so negative - and that's not a coincidence, by the way. The term was coined by the very people trying to portray it as a negative thing. "Social Justice" has been bandied around, but it too has acquired some negative connotations and its true meaning can be rather ambiguous. Let's go for the more denotative expression of "Social Responsibility". There is still some room for interpretation here, but there's a lot less ambiguity and it certainly sounds like something we should be doing.
To start with, just because a person is wealthy does not somehow grant them greater value as a human being. How can a society that condemns feudal serfdom simultaneously denounce class war? It makes no sense. And the worst part is, the "victims" have, with their great power and influence, managed to somehow convince the real victims - the lower-middle class and the working poor - to support the wrong side. They do this through clever emotional manipulation and overuse of the phrase "American Dream". After all, everyone wants to achieve the American Dream, right? "Why should I demand more concessions from the wealthy?" You might say. "I could be rich myself someday, and then that would be really inconvenient!"
The rich can afford to support this idea because they know it will never come true, and yet they know everyone harbors the hope that it will. They know it won't come true for the same reason the rest of us do: everyone can't be rich, because if we were, who would greet us at Wal-Mart? Yet hope is a powerful thing. This strategy has been used by those in power to manipulate the masses since time immemorial. When Odysseus proposed his strategy for settling the suitor debate over Helen (later of Troy) - that all suitors would agree to abide by the decision and pledge to defend it should the need ever arise - they all agreed in the vain hope that they would be the ones chosen, even though the odds were astronomically against them. That same principle is used today: by dangling the American Dream in front of their noses, we can get a remarkable number of people to go against their own interests because they're all hoping they'll be the one to magically benefit from it someday.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)