Draining the Swamp

[C-Mag]

A fairly obvious example of Government and Business misconduct is the 2008 sub prime stock crash.

It was 100% created by US Government Policy, and taken advantage of by Wall Street and the banks, who got paid off, while the stupid got fleeced. They got fleeced because they bought houses they couldn't afford or ARMs because the government told them they needed house or an ARM.

[DBTrek]

Nothing like a ruling aristocracy to ensure peasants don't accumulate family wealth.


But the dude advocating that position wants me to wear his label.

[Martin Hash]

That’s the exact opposite interpretation of what happened: government made the equivalent of CDSs illegal after a similar exploitation at the very end of the 19th century; and government used to prevent banks from investing depositor’s money; and government used to require banks to have high reserves; and Freddy May & Fanny Mac used to be under regulatory scrutiny, but all those safe-guards were removed by deregulation, and history predictably repeated itself.

[DBTrek]

Weird how humanity endured 10,000 years of history owning nothing, being disposable labor, and easily sacrificed at the whim of government control - but private industry is somehow the bane of humanity. From the Pharoahs of Egypt to the plantation owners of Dixie, government has enslaved, exploited, and annihilated humans without so much as an ounce of regret.

But suddenly ... in the last two hundred years ... as the last slaves were freed and industrial businessmen started rewarding workers as opposed to simply coercing labor from them - suddenly rich people and private enterprise are the problem.
According to whom again?
Oh, that's right, according to the institutions that enslaved, exploited, and annihilated us previously.

Sounds legit.
Rich people and their private businesses have truly fucked all of us over. Please, more government now - to put us back on the plantation, or in the desert to haul stones for the Pyramid of the Pharoah again.
That's the only way we'll get liberty back.
The historical oppressor of humanity from time immemorial must save us from these private businesses, and individual wealth, and jobs, and shit.

[Martin Hash]

Dude, your rhetoric is entertaining but do you think there’s even one person here (besides TC) who can’t tell you’re straw-manning?

p.s. It’s funny though; bravo.

[Fife]

Is Pharoh a strawman or a steelman tho

[Martin Hash]

Is Pharoh a strawman or a steelman tho

Don't you travel? Pharaoh is carved out of black granite.

[C-Mag]

That’s the exact opposite interpretation of what happened: government made the equivalent of CDSs illegal after a similar exploitation at the very end of the 19th century; and government used to prevent banks from investing depositor’s money; and government used to require banks to have high reserves; and Freddy May & Fanny Mac used to be under regulatory scrutiny, but all those safe-guards were removed by deregulation, and history predictably repeated itself.

Oh yeah, the government just acted as the Carnie hustler lining up the customers to be fleeced by the Wolves of Wallstreet.

That bailing out the banksters really helped the bankrupt homebuyer.

The government directly manipulated the housing market, but when their buddies and patrons were going to get hurt they bailed them out and gave the bill to us. If the government wanted to hold business and billionaires accountable, they would have let them go bankrupt. Sadly, not one Bankster threw himself off a skyscraper like they did in '29 and '36, because they were protected by government at the expense of the people. The same people that Filthy Collectivists, Progressives and Lefties tell me the government is helping.

[TheOneX]

DB, you idolize the wrong people. What the fuck has a rich person who inherited their wealth from a lucky forebearer ever done to deserve your unbridled admiration?

R U literally more proud of the money you've made than the accomplishments you've achieved? Do you consider accumulating money an accomplishment? Fuck, dude, spend your fucking money to finance more accomplishments. Fuck your kids; they can earn their own goddamn money.

Unless your main goal is to become part of the aristocracy? Is that it? Do you wish to establish a fiefdom? I warn you: the future you're advocating only has openings for a few very, very lucky winners, and everyone else is a serf. You're betting extremely long odds.

No, I'm simply a pragmatist with a teeny-tiny History degree. I think you and most other people are following the wrong narrative, despite your vast world experience and extreme education. Government indoctrination against the wealthy is subtle, globally prevalent, and often so transparent to those who adopt the belief that they're completely unaware they've been conditioned at all.

It's not that I love the rich. I simply recognize them as magnitudes less dangerous than the government. In fact, were we to put the body count of individual rich people up against the body count of governments - I think you'd be hard pressed to explain why more government and fewer rich people is preferable.

Bill Gates has never run a concentration camp. Jeff Bezos has never implemented a policy that starved 20 million people. Mark Zuckerberg has never buried villages of people and trampled the ground covering them with horses. Rich people are far, far, far less dangerous to me than a bunch of idiot citizens pretending that they're running a government.

Now, you might say - BUT THE GOVERNMENT IS MADE OF RICH PEOPLE. This is a case of A = B, but B *not* equaling A. Sure, the people in power tend to be wealthy - often directly from being in power. But you'll never catch them vilifying themselves, will you? Nancy Pelosi will never come out and say "Me defrauding the taxpayers with pork barrel projects for a lifetime has fucked you all over, I should be taxed into oblivion!"

Nope.

The rich people in government will always be trying to expand their own power and wealth at the expense of the rich people *not* in government. So you see, I don't think rich people are the problem. At least, they certainly aren't the problem anywhere near the level that government is.

So ... you want more government, which I consider the greater evil of the two. I'm ambivalent towards rich people existing. I don't believe the government when they tell me that Amazon caused the homeless crisis in Seattle. I don't believe the government when they tell me CEOs golden parachutes are causing the wealth gap and not their policies of offshoring jobs and printing money to infinity. In short, I don't drink the government's Kool-Aid on rich people anymore than I drink their Kool-Aid on white supremacists being the biggest threat to America.

But I accept that almost everyone else does chug that beverage.

I think there is an important distinction you are missing here between different kinds of government. In the modern world where republican or semi-republican governments are more the norm, this is true. This isn't typically true in dictatorships, which is hysterically the most common. In dictatorships, generally the person becomes a dictator by being rich, meaning they could pay the armies. The perfect example of this would be late republican Rome, where the rich used their wealth in order to become the government. Very few of the "great" men of history came from nowhere. They were almost always already nobility in some way.

I think a better way to put this is no merchant class (which Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc. are a part of) has done those things, only the ruling class has. Historically, the ruling class was the richest class, it is only within the 19th and 20th centuries that the merchant class has been able to accumulate the same level or more wealth than the ruling class.

[DBTrek]

I think a better way to put this is no merchant class (which Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc. are a part of) has done those things, only the ruling class has. Historically, the ruling class was the richest class, it is only within the 19th and 20th centuries that the merchant class has been able to accumulate the same level or more wealth than the ruling class.

So you can understand how the ruling class might feel about the rise of a merchant class that they no longer fully control. And you could understand why the ruling class would be very interested in convincing everyone that the root of all their ills is the merchant class.

And yet ... the ruling class didn't lift humanity out of poverty, improve their quality of life, and increase their lifespan by decades. Nope. That was all side effects of a rising merchant class. People complain that the school system is there only to "produce good little work drones" ... yet they completely forget that they were a collective of malnourished illiterate little labor drones before that.

So the ruling class is doing pretty good at convincing even the most educated among us that we need to cut the merchant class off at the knees - and make sure their wealth does not travel forward to the next generation.

Unfortunately for them, there's idiots like me out here who question their narrative, their historical framing, and their motives.

But ... they'll wait me out eventually.
And then y'all can freely empower your ruling class to solve all the problems they've outlined for you.
Using the solutions they've also outlined for you.
And I'm sure individual liberty will positively flourish, just like it did all those thousands of years before, when the ruling class ran things unopposed.