Seanjd
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One can dream.
Current Affairs Donald Trump POS: Judgement cometh and that right soon
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One can dream.
The causes of the bleak future are easy to understand but difficult for the liberal project to accept. The West has spent its past and borrowed on its future to buy votes in the present. Now the the millennials are stuck with the bill. Giant deficits, unfunded welfare systems, crushing student debts have come down on them just like anyone who spends more than he earns. It's the betrayal that must hurt most. They were told it was OK. Socialism would square the circle on the volume. Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman assured the public there would be no problem. After all, "the Great Depression wasn’t ended by the intellectual victory of Keynesian economics ... what put a decisive end to the slump was World War II ... this story is what led me to facetiously suggest that we fake a threat from space aliens, to provide a politically acceptable cover for stimulus."
It worked until it didn't. Youth unemployment turned out to be just deferred unemployment, the can big governments kicked down the road until the road ran out. We may be living through an enormously important period: the collapse of Gramscianism in the West. If Eastern socialism died with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the Western version may at last be crumbling before a monumental wall of kicked cans. The Gramscian termites ate through the institutions and found with their last triumphant bite that they had eaten it all.
Its demise will leave an historic hole in Western civilization. For good or ill the Left was the West's familiar: the wheedling family bum, what we defined ourselves through and in opposition to. Without the Left neither the 20th century, the EU or the American progressive project is even comprehensible. It was the future that never happened, the madness over which mankind walked the narrow path of nuclear destruction yet which framed the debate. Now it is passing from the scene with all the drama of an empty ramen wrapper on the sidewalk.
The Second Wall
tsubaki
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That article is absolute bollocks. What has failed in the US (and the UK) is not socialism - which the US has never had, and which was got rid of here between 1979 and 2007 - its the bastardized capitalist system whereby public funds (both directly in terms of taxes, and by citizens "taking on risk") get given to private concerns / firms to do various things incompetently and at vast cost compared to public ownership.
An economic recovery has not taken place because none of that massive waste has been dealt with (in fact over here at least things have gotten much worse). Until it, and the corruption that is demonstrably associated with it, is dealt with, the West will continue to stagnate and be afflicted by populism of the negative kind.
SNova
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I think the lack of an identity and a sense of who we are as a people or a nation throughout the West is creating this massive political divide. People's only identity is their ideology. And an attack on their ideology then becomes an attack on them.
“Every society depends on an experience of membership: a sense of who ‘we’ are, why we belong together, and what we share. This experience is pre-political: it precedes all political institutions, and provides our reason for accepting them. It unites left and right, blue-collar and white-collar, man and woman, parent and child. To threaten this ‘first-person plural’ is to open the way to atomisation, as people cease to recognize any general duty to their neighbours, and set out to pillage the accumulated resources while they can. Without membership we risk a new ‘tragedy of the commons’, as our inherited social assets are seized for present use.”
– Roger Scruton
Seanjd
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I think it has nothing to do with nationalism and everything to with the relentless demonisation of the working class throughout the world over the last few decades.
I agree with your position on assigning public funds to private actors while running a bunch of mumbo-jumbo about public-private partnerships. If private firms do things incompetently and at great cost on their own, they go bankrupt. The current system of assigning debts to the public side while scooping up any profits for private concerns is a dog's breakfast for the citizenry.
Example: A growing phalanx of university admins make healthy six figure incomes, while striving millennials carry six-figure debt loads to help them start their lives underwater. All underwritten by government sponsored programs - both regulations that require the new admins, and a streamlined program to help students assume the debt load. Because education. Nobody could possibly learn anything without a system of state certification disguised as a higher education hierarchy.
That money needs to be left with the citizens that earned it so that they can grow the economy in accordance with their enlightened self-interest.
In brief, you run into the "knowledge problem" with any centrally directed economy. I stand with Hayek and I stand with freedom. Failure, both business and personal, is part of life. No state can remove risk, no matter how much they may promise to do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_knowledge_problem
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tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
No, but Hayek did believe in the state and in bringing about some system whereby people could be protected against "those common hazards of life" that many people could not afford to protect themselves against, as well as preventing people from falling into absolute poverty.
abelard
Player Valuation: £35m
thanks for livening the place it up! it was beginning to sound like my office lunchroom
True, but there are no guarantees in life. If government is sufficiently poor, it will fail and fall and its promises will come to nothing. Eventually we arrive at an existential point of order, but this is usually dismissed as apocalyptic fantasy. That dismissal is true until it is not. Witness Venezuela as an example. If you can find a comparable capitalist example, I'm eager to hear what you have to say.
Constantinople eventually fell, as will our respective polities if we are sufficiently unwise over a long enough span. There is no end of history, something even Fukuyama is beginning to understand.
abelard
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can you think of any successful countries that actually do it your way?
much more I want to say about universities, but i have to actually get some work done, alas
That depends on what we define as success, doesn't it? Crack on, Professor.
SNova
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I can't see myself turning left wing like I used to be.
As I read more and more traditionalist political books I'll probably start to be far more critical towards modernity and capitalism though.
abelard
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tsubaki
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Mexico and Brazil aren't that much far behind Venezuela, and might well be in a similar place to them if the regional hegemon had interfered in their internal affairs to the same extent.
Constantinople fell because the Byzantines spent nearly a millennium taking power and wealth off the poor and spending it on the rich, so that when the crises hit they were progressively less able to deal with them. This followed the Romans destroying themselves from doing the same thing, and was followed by the Ottomans doing it as well. The same phenomenon is seen in historical Muslim regimes so often that it is almost a cliche, and it also led to the one conflict honoured with the title of Civil War over here.
abelard
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what are you reading? Howard Zinn's "A People's History of Everything?" much as I admire the earnesty (earnestness?), I suspect you might just be seeing what you already believe...
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