Skykid wrote:But Wenchang's views are purely analytical. It's like judging the situation based on small print and some asshole's graphs.
"Analytical" does not mean pushing "some asshole's graphs." It means reasoning from known information. Perhaps there's some things you don't agree with in Wenchang's posts, but a lot of it is backed up by hard-won wisdom after years of people watching the real world. Feel free to back up anything you're saying with sources, but until you do, you're at risk of being called a demagogue.
The fact is deregulation has led to corruption has led to huge imbalance in wealth and power and it's been on a sliding scale for almost seventy years.
I can't speak for Wenchang, and I hadn't earlier read the part of his post where he talks about tax rates and the tooth fairy. I'm not 100% sure how I feel on taxation, although I have long had a suspicion that taxes aren't actually the right means to deal with income inequality. The problem isn't that some people are wealthy, as such. The problem isn't that the stock market guides the economy. Rather the problems are that some people are poor, and that the stock market can distort the economy (just to pick one example). It looks like just a shift in perspective, but it's similar to reasoning behind liberal criminal law reform: "Punishment" does little in most cases, but "protecting the public" focuses on doing things that actually help fix problems and create better futures for everyone, including offenders.
I didn't see him talking about deregulation as such anywhere.
Deregulation and corruption, using their typical definitions, are two different things entirely and aren't related in the way you suggest, and in turn both are different from wealth / power inequality. Deregulation in recent US history has been accompanied by historically low levels of corruption. I'll give you that you can say that some things are actually deregulation or corruption even when not meeting the normal definitions, but if you're suggesting that there is a lot of under-the-table stuff in the US, that's not correct. The major point to make here is that wealth and power inequalities increase even in regulated and non-corrupt societies. In fact, even if we had stronger regulations, we would still likely get increasing wealth and power inequality. The various forms wealth takes include money, education, health, and influence - and there is nothing bad about these things as such. What is bad is that these things - give the wealthy means to accumulate the largest amount of the wealth of society, leaving little for other people. The problem has always been trying to fix the problems without damaging the way on up.
As an aside, one thing that is poorly understood is that corruption is more prevalent the more local the level of government. So, if I say "I'm not doing so good, make a special exception to help me out" I might not get a good response from the national level of government (that'd be low corruption) but I might have better luck at the local level - and at any case, incomes are probably going to be more comparable with those of neighbors, too. In this case, corruption is high but it's not actually hurting income inequality. History is full of little examples of people doing things that are typically corrupt but which have a heartwarming Robin Hood quality to them. The problem with this is that it's not a good way to run a society.
Of course, your views on whether wealth creation is co-generated or a zero-sum game inform the potential answers to this problem, too.
Modern day capitalism is based on self-governing corporate practice and their power over government and media, and is literally disqualifying opportunity for those not born into privilege. It's about as close you can get to genuine slavery under the false pretence of democracy.
This is not the full extent of the problem, but I mostly agree with this. However, that "about as close as you can get" kind of ignores some of the things Wenchan was saying earlier - things might not be perfect, but you don't even need to use imagination to come up with worse abuses of workers and consumers than exist today. Even back in the old days of the "good economy" companies used lots of tricks like cartels, planned obsolescence, the magical shrinking can of tuna fish, etc. - and at the same time there were other things besides, like company towns and bank terms that I don't think were any better than those today.
Saying that people have the mobility to leave one job and go to another is neither here nor there. It's like saying you can live a life of servitude slowly dying on an unliveable wage, or you can go somewhere else and do the same. It doesn't exactly instil optimism.
I think that Wenchang was actually saying something different there, but I'd like to see his response.
This is of course aimed at declining living standards, the increasingly false value of education, and dwindling opportunity in the west. Other countries have better, do better and are often going in the opposite direction.
Now here's an interesting couple of sentences: Some things the US does poorly that other countries do well, vice versa, and some things (like the value of education) seem to be problems for most developed nations. The part that is most interesting is when there are stark differences between nations. Where many nations share problems, some of that may well be due to diminishing returns on doing things in the traditional way, trying to stuff ape brains full of knowledge and skills, and the stagnation in technical advances and growth opportunities in a developed nation, etc. - these aren't things that are easy to solve. For example, the post-WWII era led to a couple "economic miracles" that look less miraculous when you consider that countries were starting back from rubble but with a newly found peace and technical prowess boosting the pace of rebuilding. Absent some radical large-scale delivery on the broken window parable, you could say we're all tooled up with not much to build.
This also challenges the perception of lowered living standards - which move quickly in response to short-term events like a financial crisis, but over the long term there are other factors which are going to shape that too. So looking at a news article about "living standards" and talking about people facing hardship in response to the 2007 financial crisis obscures the long-term problems which aren't going to go away even if we do everything possible - like the fact that there's simply less to build, and a possible slowing pace of technological improvement (this is kind of a difficult one to judge - in some respects tech and science have clearly slowed, but in others we are still seeing great leaps forward, i.e., the total of scientific knowledge still doubles at an astonishing rate, but on the other hand there hasn't been any great new theory past quantum dynamics, and in more practical terms processor technology development appears to be slowing and getting much more expensive).
If there is one thing that I didn't see Wenchang discussing which I think is critical, it's the accumulation of wealth by the wealthy, at the expense of the wealth available to everyone else.
