Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id576822564
If U.S. income inequality had remained at its 1975 level through 2018, how much more money would the bottom 90 percent of Americans have made during these 43 years? Put another way, how much additional wealth flowed to the top 10 percent during this time, thanks to increased income equality? If you have a butt, you should hold onto it, because the answer is 47 TRILLION DOLLARS.
id576822005
“market fundamentalism”
✏️ Anything taken to its extreme basically. Here it’s concocting a fear of government controlling so much, it turns into tyranny. The answer? Privatization! And lots of it. 🔗 View Highlight
id576822011
This is a system of belief that holds that political and economic freedom are indivisible. They quote the physicist Fred Singer, who wrote that “if we do not carefully delineate the government’s role in regulating … dangers there is essentially no limit to how much government can ultimately control our lives.” In other words, government interventions in the economy — such as laws removing lead from gas, carbon taxes, or mandated cooling-off breaks for people working in 100-degree heat — not only make us all poorer, but also put us on the road to Stalinist tyranny. Hence it’s crucial to head them all off at the pass, even if that requires a vast misrepresentation of observable fact.
id576822362
Meanwhile, market fundamentalists are oddly unconcerned with government intervention that’s profitable for large corporations. If you’re an entrepreneur who boldly tries to manufacture and sell any of the pharmaceutical industry’s patented products in a free market, you will quickly encounter the suffocating hand of the administrative state. Yet there are no Wall Street Journal op-eds decrying this injustice.
✏️ Enter the hypocrisy of course. Regulations are bad unless they serve the market and large corporations. 🔗 View Highlight
id576822917
Averell Harriman, the son of a 19th-century robber baron who later became secretary of commerce and governor of New York, believed that “Our social and economic system is working perhaps toward Swedish socialist concepts but not toward Soviet Communism. The government in Sweden has overcome poverty, achieved decent housing and medical services for all, but Sweden has in no way compromised the principle of representative government and concern for civil liberties.”
✏️ This was the sentiment after WWII. And yet, from there to our current time, we see the glaring shift. 🔗 View Highlight
id576824437
Lowering taxes on billionaires will unleash their wondrous creativity and make us all richer in the long run. Minimum wage laws make regular people worse off and must stop going up. (Incredibly enough, the federal minimum wage has not been increased since 1968 and, adjusted for inflation, is now worth less than in 1950.) Stultifying environmental regulations are the reason your boss can’t give you a raise. Social Security was a mistake and is destined for extinction.
✏️ The propaganda beliefs that capitalists paid for to be ingrained into reality over decades. Hence creating the insane wealth gap that everyone signed off on and allowed to happen in the background. 🔗 View Highlight
id576824384
it required enormous subsidies from corporate America, much of it going to tenured professors working at nonprofit universities.
✏️ How the propaganda machine worked, at least in one part. 🔗 View Highlight
id576823991
Adam Smith’s 1776 book “The Wealth of Nation” is now seen as the key text proving the virtues (economic and political) of unregulated capitalism. This is not true at all: Smith argues that bank regulation is crucial; that workers should unionize; that businesspeople have often “deceived and oppressed” the public; and that any political proposal they make should be viewed with the utmost suspicion.
✏️ The power of propaganda, where a text can be viewed as supporting the very thing it originally was advocating against. People hold this book up as the paragon of capitalism, when in fact it’s trying to warn about capitalism as well, and encourage regulation. Think of how Monopoly is viewed vs how it was originally set out to be. 🔗 View Highlight
id576824192
“Ideas do not exist ex nihilo. They are developed, sustained, and promoted by people and institutions. [This] is the history of the construction of a myth.”
👓 quote 🔗 View Highlight