Comments by "Regis" (@Timbo5000) on "The Dangerous Appeal of Hitler’s AI-Translated Speeches" video.
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@HannibalBarcaRTW No, the reason these speeches appeal to you is because they distract from the true reason behind these issues. Yes, quality of life is decreasing that is true, but why? It’s because of capitalism increasing wealth inequality more and more, forcing our governments to placate big businesses more and more. Big businesses are getting more powerful, especially with globalism they are becoming impervious to government regulation. If we do something they don’t like, they can move their business elsewhere, outside of our reach. We now need to court businesses to settle in our countries, to choose us over other countries. They are the true global leaders and they’re united in having interests in policy that benefits their profit margins.
Why do immigrants come here? Two answers: businesses want them here for cheap labour (notice how after brexit, the UK simply replaced eastern european immigrants with African, Indian etc immigrants? It’s because corporate interests require immigrants to do cheap labour, regardless of what the people vote for) and businesses keep those third world nations poor by extracting their resources, giving VERY little in return and pocketing all the profits. Africa is insanely rich in resources, but when a French company mines them, they employ a small number of your people maybe and pay a little tax, but 90% of that wealth is gone. Extracted never to be seen again. And if they revolt against this system? Get ready for regime change. Need a loan due to how little you profit from how we extract your resources? Here you go, except there are conditions attached that further ensure you remain poor (mostly we impose austerity measures which make investment in developing their economies impossible). So conditions are terrible there and en masse these people seek to escape this economic trap by moving to rich nations like ours. We created these conditions, our institutions like the IMF and our businesses. This is not to speak of warzones we created, like Libya, and all the refugees coming from these places. We created this issue ourselves, largely. We chose profit and the result is mass immigration. 95% of Africans coming here would gladly stay home if they could build a decent life there. And with their resources there is no reason why they can’t… IF businesses stopped exploiting their land and shipping the profits abroad.
In short, we the people are NOT in power. Not even our governments are in power. Global capital interests are in power and decide most of our economic and political life. Even our cultural/social life. We are entirely dependent on placating them to grant us their business and some taxes. And with globalism this dynamic has reached new heights, enabling businesses to pit countries against one another and forcing us to beg more than ever for them to keep their business in our nations. THAT is the core of the issue. Everything from immigration to decreasing quality of life traces back to this issue and why we can’t fix it as long as we remain capitalist
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You don’t understand socialism. You’re absolutely correct that so long as we remain in capitalism, “social” reforms can and often do have long term knock on effects. Absolutely correct, because they do nothing to change to fundamentals of capitalist power dynamics between capital owners and the rest of society. It tries to mitigate the effects of a system that fundamentally always leads to those effects due to this power imbalance and how we structured the entire economy to placate those few capitalists. It’s fighting windmills and may often enough even exacerbate those effects. Your example of rent controls and the housing market is an apt one. But what you fail to see is that there are more options than simply accepting capitalism and introducing social policies within that capitalist context. We can also critique how capitalism works on a more fundamental level and seek fundamental changes in how our economic system functions. And by this I don’t mean having the government plan the economy. If we learn anything from the 20th century it should be that planned economies do not work.
It is important to realise that every type of economy, including capitalism, has certain ground rules that can be altered. Whether or not something as basic in our present economy as the ability to own ideas should exist at all, was a major discussion in the late 1800s. Intellectual property is not a natural part of the free market, it’s a rule we created ourselves and chose to enforce on society, thereby shaping the basics of our present economy. And yes, even property as such is such a constructed rule.
Many types of free markets exist, including markets much more free than capitalism is. Market anarchists for instance propose a free market based on usufruct: whoever uses something owns it. I.e. you own your house not because of a piece of paper that says you do, but because you actually live there. And yes this is a form of socialism because the people that operate a business, own it because they operate it. And all people engage with one another on the basis of free exchange and market dynamics. Without property existing. There is only one thing prohibited: you don’t forcibly take something that is used by another. That’s theft. This funnily enough makes property a form of theft, as Proudhon famously wrote. In short, many types if markets are possible, and capitalism is but one of them. We decide on which basic rules an economy functions. Property is a made up rule based on state violence enforcing it upon us all, and that is what determines much of how our market functions. Different rules can be enforced or no rules can be enforced at all (except no theft/violence) and we can have free markets that function very differently. You don’t like publicly traded companies for example, this is another one of these made up rules that exists only by virtue of state violence enforcing it. Most rules do, down to the very basics of property itself.
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