Comments by "Alan Friesen" (@alanfriesen9837) on "Robert Reich" channel.

United we bargain, divided we beg. (I can't take credit for that one. I saw it on a bumper sticker attached to a locker door)
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@DavidAdkins78 I'll take that Ponzi scheme. It's held for what, eighty years now? And before that the elderly had to move in with their children. Social Security and pensions are what give most of us dignity in our old age.
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Yes, the reality is that many people trying to take care of families end up in these jobs. And whether they are taking care of others or not, they're still working their tails off. Munimum wage should be a living wage and if you're business can't afford it, then you shouldn't be in business.
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Frederic Bastiat You do realize that California has a lot more of every kind of person than Mississippi I hope. Much larger population pool: 37,253,956 vs. 2,967,297
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Frederic Bastiat What the customers like is obviously more important than what the workers need, right?
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@Kermit_T_Frog Capitalism is efficient in large part because it so effectively harnesses avarice and fear. Unchecked, it leads to ruinous exploitation, which is why regulation is so important if you don't want a society where most people live in misery. Socialism is the best tool for creating a society where the most people can have a decent life. However, if it eliminates positive incentives for ambition completely then the inefficiencies will lead to a societal malaise that stymies progress and makes a society uncompetitive regarding its more liberal competitors. There has to be a balance, and right now the United States is out of balance.
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It's not just billionaires—it's anyone with disposable income and a distaste for government.
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@ramirorodriguez9671 Good corporations are organizers that bring labor and capital resources together to produce goods and services. They do so for the benefit of their shareholders and they are functionally amoral. Labor makes stuff with capital; corporations facilitate that process. Households drive demand and the labor/capital/corporation machine is a mechanism for supply provision and a market lubricant as the primary distributor of purchasing power to households. Corporations have value, but the value should not be overstated; they are an agent of supply, not demand. To the extant that corporations create jobs, it is because household demand creates a need for corporations.
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@nevadataylor Unfettered liberalism (lack of regulation) is what leads to gross inequality and this is because capitalist priority is short-term profit. Any system that is too dominant has to become authoritarian or fall to the disaffected, this includes liberal free market. The role of government is to provide for the well-being of the governed and that includes regulating entities that have the capacity harm the public. I'd argue that concentrating society's resources in the hands of the few at the expense of the broader public is harming that society and risking insurrection through disaffection is extremely reckless.
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It is a good argument for impeaching the president—one of many. The counter-argument is that it's too risky, and not just from a partisan standpoint. If Trump "wins" an impeachment contest (and with the make-up of the Senate he will), then that will be proof that nothing can stop him. By trying to impeach (which most of the country thinks of as to remove) a wannabe dictator and failing, we may be shoring up his position, not as the Republican candidate for President, but as the political juggernaut against whom all resistance falls. It's an outside chance that this could accelerate the process of turning him into the dictator he wants to be. Nothing that's supposed to have checked him up to this point has. Forcing the issue may bring him down, but with the Senate make-up it probably won't. If it galvanized his position and solidified his power, it might be the biggest mistake we ever made.
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I don't know. If he still gets a Fed appointment in there that is any kind of incompetent or sycophantic then I don't think he's fired enough.
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@RandallJamesPeterson Yes, and good companies wouldn't have that short-term market disadvantage versus lousy companies, at least as far as healthcare costs were concerned.
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@SSChevy2004 Also, Puerto Rico, USVI, American Samoa, Northern Marianas and Guam
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@azzir325 More like 39 to 41 percent, but you're right, it's still a substantial fraction.
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@Kermit_T_Frog Where I differ from the revolutionaries is that my observations of revolution suggest that the suffering involved is unconscionable. Once the powers that be are converted into corpses and exiles, the revolutionary factions usually turn on each other. The victorious faction, having killed off the others, then starts a paranoid search for impurities within their own ranks. And when all that's left are the dead and the terrified, the system that emerges is rarely an improvement on the one that was overthrown.
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@Kermit_T_Frog I didn't know that, but I wouldn't be surprised.
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@nevadataylor Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Without corporations you're not going to have the kind of large scale firms necessary to provide living wages to workers. Corporations are not evil, they just need to be regulated sufficiently to make sure that their pursuit of profit doesn't undermine the general welfare.
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@ramirorodriguez9671 Everybody does. It's important though that we understand both the importance of corporate firms, and the importance of keeping them in check.
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@ramirorodriguez9671 I agree. One thing that we need to consider going forward though is that there are economic behemoths in the international marketplace that have government support and in many cases government subsidization. If we want American companies to compete internationally than it's important that they can harness the economies of scale that European, Asian and Chinese rivals take advantage of. I'm a huge advocate of strong government regulation but I'm disconcerted by the ideology of anti-bigness that seems to be infecting some segments of the populace.
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@eaglesclaws8 Too true.
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@nevadataylor Capitalism in its purest sense is by definition a liberal free market and I agree that it is destined for failure (or at least cyclical brutality) because it naturally trends towards wealth inequality and exploitation of the masses. Because of this capitalism, in order to survive over time, has to be managed through an institution of authority, and that is government. I looked at your video on Jacque Fresco's economic model. It's highly Utopian, and that's good. We should be thinking about how to optimize human comfort and content not in terms of average comfort but in terms of both total comfort and equally accessed and distributed comfort. The issues I have with the video are mostly in the latter half of the presentation. I disagree with the "Proximity Strategy" laid out in the video. The energy and material conservation of eliminating trade I suspect would be countered by the inefficiency of creating micro-factories everywhere that could not take advantage of scale efficiency as well as the costs of creating and maintaining artificial environments so that you could grow that coffee in Siberia. The other issue I have is with the "Strategic Access" subsection. Elimination of ownership means loss of any kind of control. I have to imagine that there would be conflicts as people failed to return borrowed objects in a timely manner or insisted on greater shares of some resources than that of their colleagues. These are the things that really took a toll on attempts at communism—y'know, human nature. In order to instill in people the discipline necessary to behave in such a way that they put the collective needs ahead of their own desires and that of their families you'd have to have either a pretty intense reprogramming of human norms or a pretty unyielding enforcement corps. Either of these would require a strong governing authority. You may argue that that authority should rest in the hands of a complex computer program; I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that myself though and I suspect that neither are the majority of other people. Aside from the isolating aspects of it and the likely costs of changing human behavior in the short term I think the Venus Project has merit. It certainly makes for a worthwhile thought experiment. I think that over time a technocratic approach to economics will be shown to be better than the lassaiz-fair approach that dominates much of the world today, but at least for the foreseeable future we're going to have to cultivate a human governance that takes into account the needs of people both to have individual personal value within society (and the hope of increasing that value) as well as control of their reasonable quantity of possessions.
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