Current GDP and Economy

The first thing to understand is that economic activity is just activity, and that just looking busy, doing more stuff, isn’t a useful goal in and of itself.

More people doing more stuff, moving things around, moving money around, stressing out, sending emails back and forth, hurrying from one place to another, having meetings, … Well yes, ok, it’s economic growth, sure. But… Is it achieving anything useful?

Sometimes. 
But often, a lot of that energy is wasted.

Imagine some people who don’t smoke. 
And they want to grow their economy. So they start working more, to plant tobacco, and to harvest and process it, and to transport it, and to advertise it, and to sell it. 
They end up with a growing consumption, growing sales, jobs, etc. 
Then they hire propaganda specialists and think tanks to cast doubt on the link between smoking and cancer, and they hire more advertisers to push it even more aggressively, promoting smoking as something healthy. 
And they also have to hire more doctors and nurses and build more hospitals to treat all the sick people dying of cancer. 
And they can have some random grifter writing ineffective self help books on how to stop smoking. 
And pharmacies selling nicotine patches.

Now it’s very obvious that the tobacco industry grows the overall economy. 
People end up working more, more taxes are paid, more profits are made, more people are sick, more nicotine patches are sold, etc. 
There is a lot of economic activity going on, people are doing stuff, money is changing hands, surgeons get paid to help lung cancer victims.

But… it’s not actually improving society.

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Some economic activity is useful. 
For example, if you want a house, the house needs to be built, so what the workers are doing is useful.

If you want to eat food, farmers need to grow food. 
So you can’t really have no economic activity at all.

But at some point, you hit diminishing returns. 
Working one job, so that you can afford to put food on the table, sure, that makes sense.

But if you already have a second job, so that you can fund some kind of sugar/soda/junk food addiction, where the farmers grow extra corn syrup, more than needed, and there are teams of people working to advertise the junk food to you as dishonestly as possible, and you consume more than needed, and your waist size keeps growing along with your weight and your consumption, and you are struggling to afford the healthcare and the insulin costs linked to your sugar addiction, and people are employed to push misinformation blaming fat for obesity, and coca cola funds misinformation saying it’s actually just about exercise and sugar isn’t to blame, and there are a zillion people selling ineffective diets and so on…

Well, all of that extra economic activity is “doing stuff”, money is changing hands, stuff is happening. 
But again: Is it really improving society, is it improving your life?

You could get a third job and try to struggle to afford some gambling addiction or something like that, so that more stuff is done, and more money is changing hands.

But again, is that really all that helpful?

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Personally, I find that if I consume a moderate amount of food, I’m actually happier than when I’m consuming more and more, and growing more and more obese.

I’ve never hit the point where the growing consumption of food and growing weight caused me to need growing amounts of healthcare services to deal with a growing number of chronic health issues.

But honestly, I’m really not interested at all in that kind of growth just for the sake of growing.

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Growing pollution, growing global temperatures, growing CO2 levels… 
It’s going to lead to more economic activity. 
As more natural disasters happen, people will have to rebuild more, people will have to leave there homes behind, other people will be building fences and concentration camps, there will be growing wars, just more and more panic and frenzy and stuff that is done.

But again: Are we really that desperate for something to do, that we want to create that much more work for ourselves?

What if we had a growing amount of free time instead of growing obesity? Would that really be so bad?

Someone who is just spending time with friends or family is not increasing the GDP or growing the economy. 
Someone who stops smoking, stops drinking, stops gambling, stops compulsively stress eating, and stops having so many chronic health issues, and instead meditates, and does bodyweight exercises at home, and has human relations, is shrinking the economy, hurting the addiction industry.

Is that really so bad?

Do we really need to ramp up the production of bombs and stuff like that, to produce ever more wars? 
I’m not saying we need 0 production of anything, but this whole cult of production and consumption for the sake of doing stuff and being active all the time, seems rather toxic. 
Instead of just trying to look busy doing something, we should think about what the actual goal is, no?

One of the issues is that financial wealth disappears when inequality is reduced and distribution is improved.

Financial wealth only exists when there is also poverty. 
Wealth inequality and wealth are the same thing in capitalism.

In the US, there are around 150 million houses, and there are 133 million households. So there is more than enough for everyone.

But right now, many people do not have access to housing. 
There are homeless people, there are people living out of their cars, and there are people who do not own housing, who are forced to rent it.

This makes the housing very valuable. A house in the US is worth $400k. 
It’s worth a lot of money, because there are lots of desperate people, who desperately need housing. 
There is some guy who is living out of his car, who would be willing to take on a 30 year mortgage in order to access a house, there are tenants who are poor, who can be forced to pay each month for housing.

This means that the housing is an investment, there can be rental units, there can be speculation, and the houses are worth a lot of money. 
Because so many people don’t have a house, and desperately need some way to shelter themselves from the elements.

But if you were to redistribute the housing? Taking 133 of the 150 million homes, and giving one to each household?

Then the price of the houses is going to drop to almost nothing.

Instead of everyone having a 400k house, now everyone has a $40k house.

What good is it to have an extra house, if there are no desperate people who are wiling to pay through the nose for it? 
It becomes financially worthless if there are no poor people to exploit.

The housing stops being “wealth” worth truckloads of money, and it just becomes… A roof over people’s heads, to shelter them from the elements. A place to live, a home to raise a family.

Because things suck for a lot of people.

A lot of people have a sentiment not just of stagnation, but that things are actually going downhill, getting worse over time.

Despite technology having improved, it now takes 30 years to afford a house. 
In a digital age where it’s easier to share information than ever, education comes with gigantic student debts and leads to unpaid internships and an unstable job market. 
The social media that was supposed to connect people has left everyone more lonely and disconnected than ever. 
Healthcare costs are through the roof, and at the same time most people’s health is in a miserable state. 
Obesity, being able to afford a caffeine addiction, cheap telescreens to spy on our every movement while trying to turn us into phone zombies, and the mountains of microplastics that are accumulating as a result of massive amounts of cheap consumerist crap, are declared to be the signs that life is awesome, and that everything is going great. 
We are constantly told that the economy is growing, that we are all getting wealthy beyond belief, that everything is getting more and more amazing by the minute.

But people don’t feel so great, life feels like a black mirror episode.

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So this leave 2 options:

Option one, is to admit that the system isn’t working well. 
That it is in fact producing boatloads of cheap consumerist crap, making lines go up, creating people who can afford private epstein islands and volcano lairs, that it is in fact increasing the production of debt, of bombs, and of addictions, and that this is actually not a good thing.

The other option, is to find a scapegoat, and blame them. 
Declare that everything is their fault, that they are the reason why people are not happy even as more gambling apps are being developed.

The first option would mean changing things, and less power for the people who rule over us. 
So the second one, which preserves the status quo and allows things to continue going down the same path, following the same trend, is the one that is chose by the media, the politicians, and the ruling elites.

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Differing scapegoats are being targeted and blamed for everything that is wrong with modern society. 
Trans people are different, a minority, and most people don’t really have much knowledge or any personal experience with someone trans, so that makes them OK-ish scapegoats. 
But at the end of the day, even very bigoted people have trouble explaining how harassing trans people is supposed to make their lives any better.

But if the whole issue is not a tiny fraction of the population using the wrong bathroom, and it’s not the system itself, and it’s not the billionaires at the top, then who is left?

Competing workers, that’s who.

Within the logic of capitalism, where there are no unions, there is no class consciousness, no cooperation, no helping each other, and making life better for each other… 
Well other workers are seen as people who compete for jobs and drive wages down. 
People who compete to buy things like groceries, gas and housing, and drive prices up.

So that’s why we see the two main scapegoats being DEI and migrants.

In case it was not clear for some people, DEI outrage is even more about the idea of people “stealing jobs” than the whole migrant thing.

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As most jobs continue being mechanized and the hope is to have LLMs do most of the other jobs, there are going to be more and more workers left unemployed and wondering “who the hell took my job?!?”, so I would expect more scapegoating of things like DEI and immigration by the ruling overlords.

Here are the next steps to keep going in that fascist direction:

• DEI hatred becomes open white supremacy
• Nationalism and hatred of immigrants turns into ultranationalism, and other nations being seen as competitors to be taken out
• It’s declared that women need to stop stealing jobs too, and instead be forced into birthing rape babies in order to serve national interests
• Continued market economy, but with closed borders to migrants and tariffs on foreign goods or import bans, trending towards ideas of autarky
• Looking at places like Greenland and Venezuela as potential options for more Lebensraum
• More cult of hard work and poor people being accused of being lazy, slogans like “Arbeit macht frei” making a comeback
• More deportations, more detention camps, more mass incarceration, more convict labor and exploitation, more surveillance to look for any potential anti-regime activity, more violent repression, militarized police, brutally killing people in the streets, more endless wars, more death penalties

The lines between the individual and the community are already being redrawn.

Wealthy people are no longer really seen as just individuals. They have accumulated too much power already. 
They are now seen as the job creators, the investors and entrepreneurs who decide the future, and the people who pay to fund the police and the prisons. 
Wealthy people have merged with the economy and the nation in people’s minds. 
It’s very common to hear that since tax cuts and subsidies and wars are good for the wealthy, it’s going to be good for the economy, and good for the nation.

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The trend towards fascism is kind of an inevitable result of capitalism over time.

Take something like healthcare. 
The humane thing to do, would be to treat people like human beings, and provide healthcare to people who need it, based on a medical diagnosis.

When instead you want to have something inhumane, that prioritizes the profits of wealthy people over human lives and human health, when you want a system where hospitals are dumping patients in the streets, where people have to ration insulin, and where getting sick will bankrupt people even though they are paying through the nose for insurance every month…

Well, you have to develop a pretty vile, cruel, inhumane ideology in order to support it.

In the capitalist ideology, the other human beings who need healthcare stop being seen as humans in need of help, and instead are seen as competitors. 
Thus the whole “I don’t want to pay for a competitor’s healthcare!” thing.

Since the capitalist ideology can’t blame capitalism itself, or the pharmaceutical companies, or the health insurance companies and so on for the high price of healthcare, the other people also trying to access healthcare are scapegoated. They are declared to be the ones at fault for such high prices, and the idea becomes that if were just left to die, then prices would drop and it would be cheaper.

And then once the capitalists promote the Malthusian laissez-faire potato famine ideas that cutting all welfare and letting competitors die would probably improve things, that moves the overton window enough for the fascists to show up with ideas on how to take out competitors more efficiently.

If evicting people from a house is normal in order to make space for someone else who is said to deserve it more… Then why not evict people from the country to free up a job, or why not evict people from Greenland to have more space? 
Once the surveillance and the brutal police repression, and the constant wars and giant military has been normalized, well why not have another war for the good of the nation? Just a short one, not an endless one, just a tiny little blitzkrieg!

Thus proceeds the slow descent from capitalism into fascism.

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It’s not really possible to keep a capitalist system with a giant military industrial complex that generates private profits and lobbies for more war without trending that way. 
It’s not possible to keep a capitalist healthcare system where profits are put above saving human lives, without normalizing deaths for profit.
It’s not possible to normalize a housing system based around homelessness, evictions, and ever increasing rents for private profits, without moving the overton window towards deportations.

You can’t have an ideology of “money makes right” without people slowly realizing that it means “might makes right”.

Everything that would involve treating people more humanely, with less cruelty, would mean less power for the elites. So it’s always declared to be incompatible with capitalism and free markets, bad for wealthy people and thus for the economy.

Wealth inequality grows, the wealthy own almost everything, and everyone else is already under a giant pile of debt. So to keep growing the profits of the wealthy who already own everything, capitalism has to morph into fascism.

The only other option is to go in the other direction, removing the profit motive from wars, removing the profit motive from mass incarceration, removing the profit motive from housing, removing the profit motive from healthcare, etc.

In a capitalist system where a neighbor is not treated with love or kindness or even basic human decency, but is instead left to die so others can have more… Well that kind of heartless, callous attitude, where deaths for profits are normalized, leads to fascism.

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I don’t know how to get people out of that shitty horrible mindset of considering fellow workers as “stealing” from them, seeing them as competitors and aliens instead of fellow human beings who are also working to try and improve their lives.

I’m not sure how to get people to notice that the border fences and the extra deportations have not actually improved their lives in any way, that housing and grocery prices are still going up, and wages still stagnating or even going down as things switch to a gig economy.

I try to explain it to people, but most do not seem to grasp that deporting the workers who build homes is unlikely to reduce the price of housing, and that the people who own all of the real estate and are filling their pockets with passive incomes are the ones to look at.

Many look at the trillionaires doing nazi salutes with adoration in their eyes, many talk about wars as a good thing, request more prisons, more people behind bars to be tough on, and homeless people being bulldozed away, treated like things. 
It seems incredibly hard to get through to the “I’m not paying for a competitor’s healthcare” crowd and get them to notice that any insurance scheme already does that, and that a couple of billionaires having the best healthcare in the world doesn’t actually help THEM and their family. 
Many even seem reluctant to imagine people having even the most basic human rights.

Many don’t even really seem to care about whether their own lives are improved at all in any way, as long as they can take out their rage on someone else by using state violence as an intermediary.

Appealing to a better nature does not work, and appealing to self interest also does not work, because many people are too angry to think.

People would need to calm down in some way first. If they were less angry, I’m convinced that many of them could be reasoned with. 
But I don’t really know how we could deal with this mass anger we are seeing. 
Perhaps widespread campaigns to offer free hugs should be on the menu? Should people be encouraged to try and share more funny cat videos again? I’m open to any ideas.

Can humans solve poverty?

Most proposed solutions to poverty, such as higher minimum wages, or universal basic income, or everyone working harder to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, simply cannot work.

This is because prices for something like housing or rent do not depend on how much it cost to build the house, but instead depend on how much money the people who need housing have access to.

When people have access to lots of money because of 30 year mortgages… Well then prices end up very high. 
If families have 2 incomes? Prices rise.

This is something that was already analyzed in detail centuries ago by Adam Smith, who noted that handouts of kelp only led to increased rents, that the wealthy owner would gladly reap what he did not sow, enrich himself, and keep everyone living paycheck to paycheck.

It was noted by Marx, and by Henry George (the guy behind Georgism), and by many others. 
It’s really easy to notice for anyone who actually cares to look.

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Thing is, making a fortune in real estate and getting insane amounts of passive income from rent, is very profitable and very convenient for wealthy people.

Even if it causes poverty, and forces others to work a lot to own very little.

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We can solve poverty, but that would mean taking away rent seeking, taking away the passive incomes of the very wealthy.

And they don’t want that.

But as long as we don’t deal with that, we can’t change much. 
It’s a bit like trying to improve the living conditions of a slave: If he still has an owner, then if you give the slave extra food, the owner can just cut back on the amount that he gives to the slave, and in the end nothing changed.

We can end poverty, but to do so would require ending the power discrepancy, the legalized rent seeking, the ability to derive a passive income by threatening others with evictions. 
Otherwise any money or benefits given to the poor are immediately siphoned up by the rich.

And it’s not just like this with housing: 
Take something like insulin prices in the US, and you get the same issue. You could give people a million dollar subsidy to buy insulin, and soon the price of insulin would be over a million per vial.

It’s not some magical thing, again, a corporation with a monopoly on a life saving drug raking in giant profits is absolutely expected, everyone who looks at these things knows that this is how it happens.

But… the owners of the pharmaceutical companies like to get dividends and passive incomes, and wealth growth. 
If you want to solve the eternal poverty of the people who pay $500 a month for insulin, you’d have to take away the government granted monopoly and rent seeking rights and passive income of the pharmaceutical company.

Otherwise, the result is very predictable: The prices are raised, until people are left living paycheck to paycheck, and struggling to afford even that.

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We’ve had insane gains in productivity, production was automated robotized, mechanized, industrialized. 
But people still struggle to make ends meet in any system where rent seeking is allowed, no matter how productive they become.

That’s because even a medieval peasant was already able to produce more than enough to feed and house and clothe himself. 
The reason that medieval peasants struggled was that they had to fund castles and cathedrals and palaces for the lords and the nobles.

If we keep that system, then even if we produce more, even if we work more, even if we have more money… 
Prices will be increased, the wealthy will siphon up all the improvements, and then build themselves palaces or do space tourism.

In theory, we should be able to agree on a lot of things.

Take something like insulin. 

If you give a for-profit corporation a monopoly on a life saving drug, they will jack up the prices to maximize their profits. 
This is very basic market theory, that every capitalist can understand. 
Every capitalist has also learned to repeat that monopolies are bad, and that competition is good.

So, we should be able to agree to get rid of government granted monopolies over drugs, right?

Lol, nope! 
Suddenly, the capitalists don’t want capitalism. 
Suddenly, they hate the idea of competition, of opening up the market, of removing the rules that keep out competitors.

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The sad reality is that while capitalists hide behind ideas of free markets, they only do it when it suits them. 
They want “free markets” when it fucks over the little people, not all the time.

They don’t mind pharmaceutical companies getting super wealthy off creating an opioid crisis. 
For that kind of stuff, they want deregulation, government staying out of things, letting the pharmaceutical companies enrich themselves with no rules and no intervention.

But when the free market ideas would hurt the big corporations, and help poor people?
When it comes time to fight against government granted monopolies on insulin, on one click buying, or on rectangles with rounded corners? 
POOF! 
Not a capitalist left in sight.

It’s like when it comes to discussing migrants who want to move to get a better job. 
All the free market people who want big government to stay out of people’s lives? Who chant that people who give up freedom for security shall have neither? 
Gone! 
Nowhere to be found.

Or with all of the “you will own nothing and be happy” stuff, where nobody owns anything anymore, corporations remotely control the stuff that you bought, can take away your media and disable it, can discontinue services and remotely deactivate stuff people bought, or enforce artificial restrictions on a printer so it won’t accept ink from a competitor and all that? 
Nope, when it comes to right to repair, when it comes to the holy sanctity of private property, and actually being able to do what you want with the stuff that you bought… 
No more capitalists to be found! 
Instead they want government to persecute people for hacking and jailbreaking their own devices, that they bought.

Being tough on crime, upholding the law, enforcing contracts? 
When it suits the wealthy, capitalists LOVE that shit. 
But for the little people? Nah. Poor people have to agree to private arbitration to exist, so they get whatever the corporations decide, and have no rights to class action lawsuits or things like that.

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That’s why it’s so hard to ever agree on anything: Most capitalists just don’t want things that would reduce the power of the oligarchs, and help the little people, the average Joe.

They bring up ideas of free markets, of competition, of deregulation, only for as long as those benefit the wealthy, and discard those very same ideas immediately when they could be used to benefit the average person.

They want to socialize the costs and privatize the profits, and to kneel before billionaire oligarchs. 
They don’t seem to have any other principles than just doing whatever benefits the ruling oligarchs at any time.

Hell, even something as simple as endless wars: 
It should be super EASY for capitalists to say “uh, I don’t want my taxes to fund other people’s death”, “government should get out of people’s lives, government is not the answer, it is the problem!”, or “who’s gonna pay for it”, or “we should be more fiscally responsible, we cannot afford it!”, or some other capitalist slogan along those lines. 
They could be arguing that there is probably lots of fraud, that lots of the people who receive missiles don’t deserve any, that they should just pull harder on their bootstraps and buy their own missiles if they want some. 
But nah. 
When it comes to filling the pockets of the military industrial complex, to wasting taxpayer money, and to sending average people to the meatgrinder, suddenly, there isn’t a single one of those anti-big-government free market advocates anywhere.

They are only here when it comes to protecting the interests of the wealthy.

Some poor person is getting screwed? Capitalists chant “life’s unfair, deal with it”.

But if some wealthy person needs to pay taxes? Never a single capitalist around to scream “life’s unfair, deal with it!” at them when they complain.

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Really, the modern capitalist should just be called an oligarchist. 
Apparently all they want is a powerful ruling class that they can kneel before and worship like fanboys.