If only capitalist democracy put the decision making power in the hands of the masses. We would have universal healthcare by now and like none of the wars of the past 30 years.
No, really it’s the capitalists who make decisions, and they’ve designed it so that the people who own capital can take advantage of the people who don’t own capital. It’s got very little to do with smart vs stupid, and very much to do with “has” vs “has not.”
My dread got way worse after going to college for biology because every class tells you how fucked things are and can point to the science that proves it.
The worst is when family or friends try to tell you “Things won’t be that bad.” No, if anything it’s going to be worse, because we’re doing fuck all to turn things around.
For a solid chunk of time in Obama’s first term the Dems controlled all branches of government but did not pass any of the progressive legislation that he campaigned on, like universal healthcare.
I acknowledge that it helped millions of people, but that doesn’t mean that the ACA wasn’t a rug pull on the American people as a whole in the long run.
He had the opportunity to give everyone universal health care and instead he chose to give us the half-baked “solution” that is utterly dependent on republican good will while also driving up health insurance profits, leaving us more reliant on middlemen insurance companies than ever before.
So yeah, people are hurting without it, but don’t pretend like it was some nice gift. It was a token that was tossed our way so we wouldn’t ask for more.
Political power is not something that can be given in a ballot box, it must be taken. Too many people believe that their only political outlet is voting. Join a community organization and start fixing the problems you see instead of listening to politicians who tell you to wait for 4 more years until the “good guys” get back in power.
America has a two party system where both parties are controlled by capitalists and the entire system is designed to keep the populous divided and distracted so that the capitalists can continue to extract wealth. In such a system, participation itself is the moral choice, not the choice between one side or the other.
Voters give legitimacy to the false dichotomy that capitalists present us.
When you have a monopoly and a captured customer base, it doesn’t matter what happens to your users. Although, yes, tech bros tend to get mad if someone else is abusing their serfs.
I disagree that greed and selfishness are innately driving characteristics to all of humanity, or that those traits motivate more growth and development than altruism and cooperation. Humans, after all, are a social species. I do agree that capitalism incentivizes greed and selfishness, and that in fact it is not possible to succeed at capitalism unless you are greedy and selfish. Because the material realities of our society make success reliant on selfishness, we have more people behaving selfishly than is "natural."
Honestly though, this is why arguments about "human nature" are all bunk. We are products of our environments at all times. A hunter gatherer behaved very differently to a modern office worker, and both would struggle wildly to adapt to the other's environment. There is no one pure human nature.
The Heritage Foundation is a terrorist organization.