Comments by "Alan Friesen" (@alanfriesen9837) on "The 4 Biggest Right Wing Lies About Inequality | Robert Reich" video.

  1. 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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  2.  @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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  3.  @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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  4.  @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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  5.  @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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  6.  @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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  7.  @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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  8.  @eaglesclaws8  Too true.
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  9.  @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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