By handing the responsibility of bailouts to the Fed and other central banks, lawmakers can pretend they’re not involved.
Wolf here: occasionally I highlight comments that add a different angle or flavor or an illustration or more depth to an article published on Wolf Street. This comment is by NY Geezer, in response to my article, The Structural Jobs Fiasco No One Knows How to Deal with (including a superb video, “Humans need not apply”).
The article discussed how automation, bots, or algos – however we call them – are taking over activities of even highly educated professionals, such as lawyers, doctors, stock traders, or coders. Which raises the thorny question: What are they going to do, these “bright, perfectly capable humans” who are no longer needed and have become “unemployable” due to no fault of their own? What is society going to do?
It elicited a lot of excellent comments. Here is one of them:
By NY Geezer:
Many here express the view that the world’s capitalist democracies are not capable of satisfactorily resolving the related problems of long term unemployment, underemployment, and the unrelenting destruction of the middle class. I concur.
The western democracies have had many years to provide a satisfactory resolution and have failed. Instead, by tending to the ever increasing needs of the crony capitalists they have exacerbated the destruction of the world’s middle classes.
I can see no reason to think that will change.
Voluntary disenfranchisement will not achieve anything. The right to vote is not relevant here. Our political representatives will not offer a satisfactory resolution if we threaten to withhold our votes now.
They were not swayed because 90% of their constituents opposed the bailout proposed by Hank Paulson in 2008. There have been no further bank bailout votes in Congress even though subsequent bailouts have been continuous, much larger and have benefitted foreign interests too.
By handing the responsibility of bailouts to the Federal Reserve and other central banks, lawmakers can pretend that they are not involved. It is by design that voters are kept out of the loop, otherwise they might think they have rights. By NY Geezer, commenting on… The Structural Jobs Fiasco No One Knows How to Deal with (including a superb video, “Humans need not apply”).
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Its a problem of viable alternatives. In order to win an election you need money. Unless you’re Michael Bloomberg it’s hard to buy yourself a political office.
That means you need a party endorsement. In order to get that support you have to show that you’re a good soldier, embracing both the public philosophy and private ethos of the party. Once youve been vetted you can run for office.
That’s why there are no candidates that oppose or favor both abortion and gun ownership. You have to oppose one but not the other. You must be anti-abortion/pro-gun or pro-abortion/anti-gun.
There’s no party whose platform is pro-abortion/pro-gun. Evert once in a while someone pulls it off like we saw with Dave Brat’s upset of Eric Cantor. Maybe we’ll have enough unhappiness that there woll be morevoter rebellions.
Dave Brat’s upset of Eric Cantor may be the dawn of hope for a seriously ill economic and political system. Money suddenly did not matter. Brat spent $200,000 and Cantor spent $5,000,000 yet lost by a margin of 56 to 44. Cantor would likely have beaten the opposing democrat in the November election. But he could not defeat Brat who is different in that he is not a good party soldier who embraces the party ethos and philosophy.
In New York Andrew Cuomo won the primary for New York Governor but his completely unknown opponent Zephyr Teachout received a shockingly high 35% of the vote. She spent $283,000 and Cuomo spent $20,000,000. Andrew Cuomo will likely win in November. His opponent is a loyal Republican party soldier.
The lesson from the Brat and Teachout campaigns is that voters will rise up and throw out the old political soldiers whenever they have an opportunity. That is beginning to happen. If it continues that will revitalize the system.
I’d love to see that. There have been signs for a long time that this is happening, and in the end it never really happens. But I’ll keep my fingers crossed and vote accordingly :-]