Going to paraphrase a quote from a podcast that stuck with me.
> What (the left) needs to do is clear out rents. Not just housing rents, but rent seekers. The economy is riddled through with people who do nothing, but get paid because structurally that’s who gets paid.
Intuit is one of those companies. They produce a few real products, QuickBooks for businesses and Mint, but overwhelmingly their money comes from the fact that they charge rent on filling your taxes. They’re a parasite on our society.
Fortunately the podcaster wasn’t talking about the US; their country was worse off than America in this area by far. But unfortunately it seems like we’re on the same glide slope if we don’t do something about it.
What passes for the left (the socially liberal corporate elites that run most of the democratic party) are pretty much just as invested in protecting the rentiers as the right wing.
Rentier money is structurally geared towards destroying any populist politicians who threaten their rents. It was a fluke that AOC won given her Democratic opponent (when she was unknown) outspent her something like 7:1. People like her arent supposed to slip through the early stage political filter.
If they do slip through there's also an enormously powerful and effective propaganda machine dedicated to character assassination.
This is so important and I think a lot of people miss it. The "left" that has power in the US (establishment dems) barely qualify as being left at all. They are very much invested in protecting power and wealth.
The only "left" that would push against the rentiers are people who will almost never see power. However, I wouldnt say AOC winning is a "fluke". Its definitely the exception, but progressives have been able to repeat it a few more times in democrat strongholds that have historically kept establishment candidates.
Right now the only "power" the real left has is withholding their votes from corporate dem bills like we're seeing with the BBB Act. This only even works because the rest of the party is interested in protecting power/wealth and is pretty inept at actually winning races.
Im mostly comparing it to the politics of the "left" in most other first world countries. In my opinion, candidates who arent willing to support guaranteed family leave, single payer healthcare, and more progressive taxes, arent very far left.
Of course you could definitely make an argument for that being no true scottsman, so I guess it just depends on opinion.
> The "left" that has power in the US (establishment dems) barely qualify as being left at all
You seem to interpret that statement as an opinion, but it is not a subjective statement. [1]
The U.S. isn't the only democracy in the world, and if we compare the Democratic party with other political parties around the world, they are indeed barely left-of-center.
I'm not sure an opinion piece in the nyt qualifies as evidence but that same analysis classified tons of other liberal parties as right wing (uk, switzerland etc) which seems more like they have a definitions problem due to a complete lack of clear criteria.
I’d argue quite strongly that liberalism is a moderate right to center position nowadays, so that sounds about right. So saying that the liberal parties are classified as right in such an analysis doesn’t seem like a contradiction or counter argument to me.
Frankly, I have no idea why people consider liberal to be left wing. How else would you describe an ideology that emphasizes private property, free trade, and market capitalism as anything other than at least moderate right? Sure, if you’re a monarchist that whole “equality before the law” sounds radical left, but for the rest of us… And that’s before we talk about neoliberalism and it’s emphasis on free markets and minimal government interference, which is hardly a leftist position.
The Manifesto Project has its downsides, but it's still one of the best datasets we've got [1], and the other survey-based datasets like the Global Party Survey [2] yield similar results [3]. (Note: You brought up the UK's Labor party which appears much more left here, as social & economic values are broken out into separate axes).
When viewed from a global perspective, the Republican party is firmly right-wing, but today's Democratic party is decidedly center-left on economic issues, and more closely reflects the values of the median American voter [4].
I think the "No True Scottsman" fallacy is confusing here. It's actually really sly.
The "No True Scottsman" statement must be used as the argument. It has to say that they're wrong BECAUSE they are not a true Scottsman.
What OP did was say there is The Left and there is "The Left".
The Left is against rentiers.
"The Left" supports rentiers.
He's dividing the two, but he's not saying one is wrong because they're not true leftists, he's saying one is wrong because they support rentiers.
But then he additionally says they're not true leftists, which is to say that a leftists shouldn't support them because they don't align, which is where the smell comes from.
The main argument is not a Scottsman fallacy. But there's definitely some implied Scottsmanism in the additional use of Left and "Left", which if read by the right person who is already weak to Scottsmanism will materialize as the Scottsman fallacy.
EDIT: I thought you were wrong, but under more analysis, I realized you were right, it was just complicated.
What do you call it when party A and party B were strongly in favor of the Iraq war and the opposition (C) comes solely from protestors who have no political representation?
A is "the left" to most people.
B is the right.
C is (apparently) a logical fallacy represented by 3 congresspeople and a senator.
AOC was right when she said in a parliamentary system she and joe Biden wouldn’t be in the same party. It’s only a fluke of voting systems that’s compressed a democratic socialist and a liberal into the same party as compared to a coalition government.
Liberalism is only left wing if it’s being compared against actual monarchists. Nowadays it’s soft right, since we’ve pretty much run out of monarchists (thank god).
Unfortunately in the US the rent seekers have an easy hack to make sure that never happens: lobbying.
The system will never change unless we vote out the current politicians, and then maybe it will change. We might have to clear out most, ideally all of the applicable congress every election cycle for a few years before we see any results. As long as we keep voting in the same people, nothing will change and it will most likely only get worse. The current political power structure is great at telling us what we want to hear, then conducting business as usual.
The only political power the citizenry has is our vote, everything else can be ignored. Emails go unanswered, polls go unnoticed, protests get suppressed.
Occupy Wall Street was 10 years ago. Thing are worse today than they were back then.
The federal system in regards to lobbying would change if we followed the constitution as written to allow House of Representatives to grow with census population count. And restore the not direct election of Senators. Then remove federal personal income tax. For icing on the cake, shut down the 3rd central bank known as 'Federal Reserve'.
This would require a nationwide general strike to show the people are serious. Most people are not serious about anything beyond TV, social media, and more personal debt.
>The federal system in regards to lobbying would change if we followed the constitution as written to allow House of Representatives to grow with census population count.
Sounds good.
>And restore the not direct election of Senators. Then remove federal personal income tax. For icing on the cake, shut down the 3rd central bank known as 'Federal Reserve'.
I’m curious to know how any of these policies would be beneficial.
I'm not the GP, but I mostly agree. The principles that I suspect we both share are that concentration of power will always result in harms, and the only way to get ourselves out of the mud is diffusion of power.
1. Up until 1913 the Senators were elected by the Representatives. In 1910 the law changed for Representatives to be per 30,000 population, to be static count of Reps. There is now is now 750,000 people per Representative. Because a Representative can not possibly talk to all 750,000, they can not represent them. The supply of their time is limited and that pushes up the supply/demand curve. They lobby for donors and only talk to the richest of the set.
If there were 131 Representatives in CA and only they could vote in Senators, the Senators would be beholden to them, and would be required to act on the average behalf. As the distribution is currently to large, this does not happen, and the poorer of the population are ignored and harmed.
2. The only tax that is non-distortionary is a Land Value Tax. All other taxes create distortions and should be eliminted. A Land Value Tax, if implemented, would be sufficient to handle all government spending. The only other tax that should be able to be implemented are Pigovian taxes on negative externalities.
3. The core mandate that the Federal Reserve handles is the management of the money supply. Austrian economic principles state that this is a waste of time, and you can do the same job, perfectly, and with less economic cycles and harm caused, by simply mandating a static monetary velocity.
So you can see in both the Taxes and the Federal Reserve example you can work out the exact algorithmic rule that should always be applied, and remove the need for individuals within the government from mucking up the system with their corruptions.
1) federal Senators were usually appointed by State legislature and were regularly recalled by States and fired when they voted against the State's interests at the federal level.
2) a consumption tax, excluding uncooked food, might be reasonable. Higher tariffs and import duties can work, and tends to reduce offshoring for the purpose of polluting 'over there'.
3) surprisingly something better than gold and silver was invented in 2008 and appeared in 2009. Bitcoin fixes this.
Those 'odd policies' freed this country from the British. People signed their name on the declaration of independence and risked their lives. They succeeded and created a constitution. You may want to skim it sometime.
Really started going downhill in 1913 with creation of third central bank of the U.S. and addition of personal income tax.
> Those 'odd policies' freed this country from the British.
That’s really not true. Never mind the involvement of the French, the current constitution is the result of the miserable failure of the articles of confederation, which was arguably closer sentiments that drove the revolution. Whether or not the constitution as it exists today reflects the principles that kicked off the revolution was hotly debated by the men that actually fought that revolution.
Regardless of the historical claim, I’m fairly skeptical of the idea that what the founding fathers wanted is inherently the best. Yes, it was better than the British monarchy, but that’s a low bar. I’d hope that we can achieve something as a society that’s better than what a bunch of slave holders thought was a neat idea.
The senate is supposed to represent the state governments at the federal level, but they stopped doing that with direct elections. It was to prevent large states with a concentration of population (currently like CA, NY, TX, FL) to have too much power over smaller states.
Here's some background on the arguments for and against. It's got some partisan hyperbole so try to ignore all that.
Honestly, I don’t really care too much about representing the states per se. It’s the people of the nation that the federal government should respond to, not the divisions.
ok, but the media would stop any general strike using identity politics and or Dem vs GOP polarization already existing...divide et impera...divide and conquer...we are already quite divided...and therefore quite conquered...
as long as the media & its corporate advertisers can keep congress and the white house more or less evenly balanced between GOP and Dem over the long term, the people will never catch on that congress is bought and paid for...and 'throwing the bums out' has not worked yet...so it will not likely work in the future...
i don't see how any action by the people is going to effect any positive long term change...all we can do is wait for a collapse of the US dollar...as long as the dollar holds its value, the elites can still control everything and keep squeezing us dry...
it's gonna get worse before it gets better...maybe a lot worse..
USA probably has the least worst currency today, due to gold being centralized in USA during WW2, along with current military spending. Euro will tank before USD.
If China plays it right, they can be the financial leader within ten years. 2031.
> What (the left) needs to do is clear out rents. Not just housing rents, but rent seekers. The economy is riddled through with people who do nothing, but get paid because structurally that’s who gets paid.
Intuit is one of those companies. They produce a few real products, QuickBooks for businesses and Mint, but overwhelmingly their money comes from the fact that they charge rent on filling your taxes. They’re a parasite on our society.
Fortunately the podcaster wasn’t talking about the US; their country was worse off than America in this area by far. But unfortunately it seems like we’re on the same glide slope if we don’t do something about it.