“I think we need a balance between the system that wants to oppress workers to maximise profit, and the system which wants workers to control their own lives”

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[2/2] What really made the former USSR actually collapse, was the neoliberal shock therapy applied after its illegal dissolution, supervised and directed by “prestigious experts” from MIT and by the IMF. There, the GDP fell as dramatically as it does in war times, and the situation was so dire that the population loss due to alcoholism, suicide, lowering standards of life and healthcare, missing births, depression, unemployment, etc. are numbered in millions of lives lost, and many millions more ruined. That’s the moment when good’ol capitalism auctioned the entire country to a few corrupt oligarchs because the priority was to privatize everything as quickly as possible, and which led to the modern fascist oligarchic kleptocratic government in Russia. But these millions of lives lost and ruined by capitalism don’t count, do they? These were somehow a necessity, unlike Holodomor, a famine in a preindustrial society.

Europe has achieved the highest quality of life in the world not by a planned economy, but by mediating the inherent problems of capitalism (monopolism, elitism, class warfare) and complete socialism (government overreach, lack of freedom, lack of democracy).

Europe has achieved the highest quality of life through a combination of imperialism and resource, wealth and labour extraction from underdeveloped countries (look up the concept of unequal exchange if you’re interested), and last century’s worker movements which achieved significant improvements in the quality of life of people, and obviously due to technical and scientific progress. But these worker victories were achieved DESPITE capitalism, not because of it.

And the technical and scientific improvements that happen under capitalism, funnily enough, are funded mostly by public research, in which universities and pulic institutions will do the brunt of the research, and then a few companies will cherrypick whatever they deem profitable, study a bit further, patent it, and then sell it to the rest of the world at exorbitant prices, as we see blatantly and glaringly with medicine and pharma. I’ll remind you which country in the world was the first to double-vaccinate 95%+ of its population against COVID: Cuba. With state-funded research, and state-funded vaccine production, with the goal of vaccinating as many as possible as soon as possible, instead of the objective of maximizing profit. Or just look on how much governmetns spent funding big pharma to develop the vaccines. This progress isn’t BECAUSE of the private sector and capitalism, it’s DESPITE it.

hould include some international cooperation, and if it isn’t possible (and seems it isn’t)

This was already obvious to Lenin in his 1917 work “Imperialism: the highest stage of Capitalism”, where he extensively criticises the idea of “ultraimperialism” or long-term collaboration between different capitalist world powers as impossible (again a successful prediction more than 100 years ago, how lucky is that?).

Corruption is indeed something that must be fought, and it wouldn’t disappear in a socialist society, as it didn’t USSR (where you could get anything for favors if you knew the right people).

Obviously corruption happens everywhere, but it’s a very different problem systemically when the means of production are owned collectively. Because, suddenly there are no private companies with the private interest of maximizing profit at all costs. So you don’t have the car factory paying the goverment official to be able to dump waste in the river, or the construction firm paying the local town hall to requalify their lands and allow for a construction plan. Embezzling and favors still exist within socialism, but without a profit motive, many other types of corruptions disappear. If there’s no wealthy ruling class whose existence and profit depends on the exploitation of the working class, suddenly there’s no wealthy powerful people doing everything legally and illegally possible to maximize their profits.

The 20th century period across Europe was indeed a rough one, many countries went fascist (Spain, Portugal, Russia

Russia went fascist? Excuse me? The USSR is the ONLY country in Europe which supported the Republicans in Spain in their fight against ACTUAL fascism, while Britain and France looked at the Nazis and the Italian Fascists supplying weapons to the reactionaries and literally bombing republican Spain, and claimed “best we can do is non-intervention and a volunteer corps” (brigadas internacionales, my utmost respect to all who participated in them)

Still, I don’t think it’s a novel example. And it’s also not an example against the current state of Europe, it’s an example of the inequality and volatility of European countries at the time.

Again, you’re failing to have a proper understanding of the reasons for fascism to exist. Fascism is a reactionary movement which takes place when the wealthy elites of a country see themselves threatened by the mobilization of the working class. It happened like this in Spain, it happened like this in Germany, it happened like this in Italy, and it attempted to happen in Russia as well (look up what the Black Hundreds were, and how Bolsheviks eliminated them). One of the most explicit purposes of fascism is to eliminate socialism and anarchism from society, for the most part through violent means. Fascism isn’t a consequence of “instability”, it’s a response to socialist movements and worker coordination.

The idea behind representative democracy is that I cannot do the work of a law-maker, deal with tax policy details while also living a life, so I elect someone whom I think I can trust.

Elected representatives aren’t a bad idea in itself, they’re just proven not to be democratic in western capitalist systems, in the sense that they don’t make decisions that represent the majority, but instead make decisions which represent a wealthy minority. Again, how many people in the EU wanted to apply austerity policy after the 2008 crisis, whose consequences we suffer to this very day? If you want an example of what real democracy looks like to me, I recommend you have a look at Pedro Ross’ book “How the workers parliaments saved the Cuban Revolution”, which details how after the dismantling of the USSR, Cuba was immersed in a deep economic crisis after losing its main trade partner, and how democratic participation by millions of people in the island was capable of saving people from the worst of the crisis.

If I have no trust in the system, I will go to the streets, as it was always the case. And yes, in this sense, we hold a lot of thankfulness for those that went to the streets before us to bring us to where we are now.

You hold them in high esteem, but then proceed to basically insult their legacy when you say that living conditions in western Europe are due to capitalism, instead of honoring the worker movements of the past century.

your (not entirely hidden) socialistic propaganda style of writing

I’m not trying to hide anything here. My username is a reference to Lenin, whom I referenced in the comment, doesn’t get much more explicit than that :)

your desire to drop the old-school battlecries without a directed objective

Firstly, I’m not the one who brought up the dispossessed masses, that was another commenter. Secondly, it’s not without a directed objective. The argument is clear: “the fault of climate change is not of the individuals who use AC, but of the system as a whole, and since the system is controlled by the ruling class, the ruling class is to blame”. It explicits this victim-blaming mindset where the general populace is blamed for climate change and pollution, when they’re not the ones choosing in which system they live. And I say this as someone who doens’t own a car out of principle, so criticism to the system is compatible with individual action and compatible with understanding that the blame is not of the individual workers.

The general problem I have (which is empirical and not substantiated here) is that Lenin himself, while likely incredibly intelligent, was not, by trade and thus biggest chunk of his time, a mathematician, or an economist, so while he can read the papers, having a fully informed opinion on the matter is a dubious idea.

I don’t accept this criticism. First of all he was a lawyer, so he definitely had education in economics. Secondly, I don’t believe that formal education in an institution is the only possible way to attain knowledge in a field. I say this as someone doing a PhD in a STEM field, knowing many people around me who have formally attained the same education level as I have and know jackshit, and others who with the same formal degrees as I do, are insanely more knowledgeable. Hell, Marx himself, who wrote one of the most influential and important works on economics of history, formally studied law and philosophy, not economics. How is this not proof enough?

Reasons why I am so jaded and critical is that many fields these days (especially lacking rigorous peer review) fall victim to innability to discern fact from fiction. Specifically for philosophy, feels like the field has diverged from mathematics and physics in an ununderstandable way, where philosophy tries to be a voice of reason in humanity’s subjective reality of society while ignoring mathematics and pure formal logic. To me this is insane. Especially for a field that was once exactly that: mathematics, physics and trying to understand the natural world. In general, the field has been critiqued for empirically arguing that its education is actually formative for logical thinking

All of this criticism of philosophy is valid, but again, socialism and Marxism aren’t philosophical ideas. They’re philosophical when it comes to the morality, sure, in the sense that I do believe that they’re morally superior to other systems, and that much is subjective. But the historical, economical, and political study of socialism and Marxism can be scientific. That doesn’t mean that every single book or article or essay on socialism is scientific, but that it can be approached as a science. Economic planning, the analysis of media, the economic analysis of capitalism and imperialism, all of those are very scientific, and the fact that you haven’t encountered scientific literature on them has more to do with your surrounding conditions or ideas than with the nature of the study debate of socialism. Especially nowadays, when there have been socialist attempts such as China, Vietnam, the USSR and the whole soviet block, Cuba… It’s very possible to do material, economical, historical and political analysis of socialism, and it’s routinely done, both from a subjective point of view and a scientific one.

The reasons I am jaded at dated books, is because the way of thinking can be so different, even in physics, many papers from early 20th century have god in the picture or see the human as some kind of special consciousness in the picture of the universe.

Being critical is good. Criticising them without making an attempt to read them based on preconceived notions isn’t. You talk about the scientific method which is great for me, since I work in that field. To me, the most important part of the scientific method are predictive capabilities. Without proving predictive capabilities, there can be no science. And when you read Lenin’s work “Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism”, and it can successfully make predictions about the economy that are valid more than 100 years ago, such as the tendency towards monopoly of capitalism (as we can see with Nestlè, Amazon or Google), or later stages of capitalism shifting from the export of manufactured goods to other countries to the export of capital to other countries (look at how much capital entered China since the 80s from capitalist countries), I’m as amazed as I am when Einstein’s theory of general relativity is yet again confirmed 100 years after its writing when SUPERLIGO is capable of detecting the gravitational waves of a collision of black holes. Especially because he was running against many economists of back in the day who were already claiming that the best way to solve monopoly was through progressive regulations… and look where that’s led us.

Regarding your discussion of how the USSR managed to defeat nazism, yes, lots of people died, but what can be expected? The USSR had 20 years to industrialize against the 150 years of Germany, of course their army wasn’t as capable or developed as the German one. This whole “meat grinder” vision of USSR in WW2 stems from Nazi propaganda, in which the Nazis were justifying losing against the “Slavic Untermenschen” because of the infinite “hordes of Asians” that they were throwing at them, and talking of the brave fight of the Soviets against Nazism as a “meat grinder” is very insulting towards the population of those countries. Belarus lost 25% of its population during WW2, and reducing their contribution to the war to “a meat grinder” is horrendous IMO.

it was a feudal state throwing meat at the problem (or rather opportunity). Among other atrocities such as forced famine Holodomor.

You don’t understand what “feudal” means. Feudal isn’t a synonym of agricultural or poor, feudal refers to a particular system of social relations, where serfs are bound to work the land of their lords without a wage on exchange, but instead receiving military protection on exchange for a compulsory requisition of the goods produced by the land, paid in kind. Again, when you use those terms in this fashion, you’re proving that you haven’t studied the true meaning of what you’re talking about.

Regarding Holodomor, it happened during the collectivization of agriculture, and it happened because of a combination of bad planning in collectivization (doing it too fast), unfair and poorly-planned requisitions of grain in certain regions such as Ukraine or Central Asia in general (which people often forget about because then they can’t make baseless claims of genocide against Ukrainians), sabotage by Kulaks, and bad crops. But this is the first and last famine that the USSR saw, and it happened prior to the industrialization of the country. Almost as if famines are commonplace in preindustrial societies, huh? Almost as if Russia was a region which has suffered historically about 5 famines per century. That’s not to say it wasn’t intensified by poor planning by the government, but again, first and last famine in the USSR. And it’s not like capitalism doesn’t create famines. Just some years later, during WW2, the British provoked a famine in India (Benghal Famine if you’re interested) which killed 3+mn people, and that one was actually done with explicitly racist undertones, with Churchill famously justifying the famine by telling Indians that “they reproduced like rabbits”.

that USSR finally imploded

If 1970s USSR was this great superpower, then somehow 10 years later it fell to stagnation and then collapse?

Because, again, you’re not being faithful to reality. The USSR never impoded, and it never collapsed. The USSR did suffer a period of stagnation, but how exactly does stagnation lead to collapse? Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. The USSR was dissolved illegally and antidemocratically against a referendum carried out in 1991, from the top down, by the Gorbachev administration. This is indeed a consequence of one of the biggest problems of the USSR: the immense concentration of power at the top spheres of government. But you can’t accuse the USSR of collapsing. In fact your reasoning is backwards. If the USSR survived to a civil war in which 14 foreign countries invaded it, if it survived to a WW2 where 25+ million inhabitants perished, and if it survived to the Cuban Missiles crisis, how on Earth is it supposed to crumble under stagnation? As I said I’m Spanish, Spain hasn’t grown AT ALL in per-capita terms since 2007, so it’s been stagnant for almost two decades at this point. Would you say it’s a failed state and that it’s collapsed and the government should be dismantled, or is economical stagnation really not that big a thing? The USSR was burdened with problems with economic planning (very hard to do properly before modern computers, if you’re interested in this I suggest that you read “People’s Republic of Walmart”, a book that outlines arguments for economic planning and criticises planning within the USSR as antidemocratic and inefficient), with overspending in military (triggered and forced by the USA despite the constant attempts of the USSR to try and reduce tensions and reach deals about disarmament and deescalation), and several other problems. But the moment it all started going down (and not just stagnating) is after the mid-80s, when Perestroika was applied and huge swaths of the economy were suddenly liberalized and subjected to markets.[1/2]

A society can’t be run on smartphones, this was patently obvious during the COVID pandemic, when governments had to decide which were the “essential jobs” that society literally wouldn’t keep running without. Were these the smartphone jobs? Or was it agriculture, education, transport of goods, supermarket cashiers, infrastructure, and trash collection among many others?

I’m fully aware that SOME people can get rich using a smartphone. Hell, I’m a lucky individual who had access to high level studies, and who fortunately enjoyed STEM, and my life is pretty dope, I consider myself very successful. I’m just not stupid enough to think that’s a sustainable, or even desirable model of society, where SOME people can be “successful” (assuming that your metric of success is income) by moving around numbers in investment funds or programming databases so that banks can surveil us and squeeze a few dollars more out of our pockets.

the desire for egalitarian utopia

Again, you’re not bringing any remotely new pseudocriticism to the table. Friedrich Engels outlines this in his essay “Socialism: utopian and scientific” from 1880, in which he explains the difference between utopian socialism, and scientific socialism. Your criticism is outdated by 144 years.

pseudo-philosophers (neither economists…

Again, showing us how you haven’t read a single essay or book on Marxism, and all you’re doing is regurgitating anti-communist propaganda. If you think Marxist writers aren’t well-versed in economics, you’re absolutely delirious. Marx is best known for his “Capital”, a 3-volume treaty on economics which is still used to this day in economics faculties. There ARE things wrong within the book such as the understanding of money which Modern Monetary Theory has extensively criticised and improved upon (if you’re interested in the field of economics), but it’s a key work in explaining many of the functionings of economics, being the first work (to my knowledge) to properly describe the process of revalorization of capital and doing a great job at analyzing economics under the light of the industrial revolution. I’m currently reading Lenin’s “Imperialism: the higher stage of capitalism”, and like half the book are references to economists or geographers, most of them non-marxists, showing economic trends in the concentration of capital, in the specifics of the distribution of colonial land among some industrial powers of the world… Even if you’re not a Marxist I suggest you have a look at it, it may change your mind about which degree of science Marxists are using in their analysis, and it’s quite short.

USSR did not go well, in any way, as an aside.

The Russian Empire in 1917 was a backwards, feudal, unindustrialized state incapable of winning a war against a recently industrializing Japan and requiring massive French loans to even attempt to fight it, where the vast majority of the population were quite literally serfs working the land for an aristocracy. If you’re interested in Russian history up until the 1917 revolutions I recommend “The Empire Must Die” by Zygar, a non-marxist writer (in fact very critical of bolshevism) in which he examined an immense amount of documents starting from 1900 and describes the period that led to these revolutions in extremely good detail.

The USSR managed to come out victorious of a 4-year-long civil war in 1921 against the Tsarist loyalists which were aided economically and militarily to the point of Russia being invaded on their behalf by 14 countries including European powers such as England, France, and Italy. By the early 1940s, only 20 years after beginning to industrialize, the Soviets were capable of defeating the industrial powerhouse of Nazi Germany (a country that had begun industrializing around 150 years prior to that). By the 1970s, the USSR had gone from being the feudal state I describe, to being the second power in the world. This is not a defense of everything the USSR did as there was massive oppression during Stalinism, but saying that “the USSR did not go well in any way” is again delirious.

what needs to just happen is European semi-capitalism semi-socialism to just be more controlled, especially with regards to tax avoidance, and anti-monopolisation, and then to government mandated climate-change-fighting policies such as heavy (and unavoidable) taxing on pollution.

I disagree. Capitalism inevitably leads to the concentration of capital and the establishing of monopolies. It’s literally the tendency of markets, since it’s a “winner-takes-it-all” system, in which once a big share of the market is consolidated by the “most competitive” company, economy of scale makes it quite literally impossible for other companies to outcompete it in a free market. The best alternative to a free market isn’t a “regulated free market”, it’s a democratically planned economy which actually goes where the population wants it to, and not where the invisible hand guides it.

“Regulating” companies into stopping their polluting and monopolistic behaviour usually amounts to allowing the companies of other countries to outcompete them (as you can see with the current cries of the EU and the USA against Chinese electric vehicles or solar panels), and that is if the capital-controlled media and elected officials even dare to attempt this in the first place. For a very recent historical example on how capital won’t allow a progressive government, you can read the case of the Spanish political party “Podemos” (I’m bringing it up because I’m well-versed in everything that happened because i happen to be Spanish). Wanting to apply this exact type of regulation to improve workers’ rights and social rights and legislating progressively towards a clean economy, there was a collaboration between private media and the state apparatus, in which a false report of corrupted money from Venezuela to Podemos and its leader Pablo Iglesias was fabricated by a rogue corps inside the National Police, and was leaked to private media. All of this is already confirmed to be true by judges, and again, you can look all of this up. The result was a multi-year campaign of smearing in private media which led to the practically total disappearance of the party, in one of the most flagrant cases of lawfare in a European country in the recent times.

Another Spanish example of capitalism refusing to be regulated is the Second Spanish Republic, in which a democratically elected leftist government in the 30s wanted to regulate for a redistribution of land to peasants to improve on the massive inequality at the time, together with labour protections and workers rights. The result was a fascist coup that sunk the country in a half-decade of civil war, and ultimately placed Francisco Franco as the fascist dictator of the country for the following 35-ish years until his death in the 70s.

The anti-scientific and ahistorical thing isn’t saying that communism can be obtained, but to say that regulations aren’t only possible, but even better. You’re just showing us that you don’t understand the history of class struggle and workers rights movements, which achieved the concessions they achieved in the western world not by electing progressive reformist representatives, but by organizing labor and striking and disrupting until their demands were met.

You know that Switzerland, a country in the literal Alps, has one of the best train infrastructures on Earth?

As the other comment said, of course there are fringe cases. There shouldn’t even be a city in Dubai, let alone trains getting there, but fortunately, most cities on earth are in accessible places because, well, otherwise why would thousands upon thousands of people go there.

That’s a policy issue, not one of engineering or physical constraints.

No, you just don’t understand that “means of production” doesn’t exclusively apply to industrial production, it talks about all capital, including financial. Lenin talks about this extensively as far back as the early 1900s, and it applies extremely well.

You still out right ignoring the point how this behavior has consequences on working people’s lives and finance

I’m not ignoring this, I’m saying increasing expenditure in healthcare, education, infrastructure and pensions can have a POSITIVE impact on peoples’ lives.

Either, money got spend and nothing to show for it. How is this good?

It’s not. We sadly live under mostly governments that follow neoliberalism. I want the opposite, I don’t want smaller governments spending less, I want bigger more progressive governments eliminating homelessness by making huge amounts of public housing in well planned out cities with great public transit, eliminating unemployment through guaranteed jobs, raising the expenditure in universal healthcare and education to have more professionals… I want actual leftism, not lukewarm centrist socialdemocrats/liberals.

Also, sounds like you are high on modern monetary theory and have not thought this through beyond repeating talking points of the theory, which were circulated on teevee during covid.

I’m very high on MMT, but why does that mean I’m repeating talking points? I’m personally very interested in economics for the past years. MMT is just a stepping stone imo for people (myself included) to learn about economics. I’d gladly apply much, MUCH more radical leftist measures than those prescripted by MMT. But a productive talk about debt and budgets isn’t a thing I’ll deny :)

COVID was an attempt do this trick and inflation spiked and people’s QoL went down.

If you think inflation was a consequence of government spending, I’m sorry, but you’ve been lied to. Inflation did spike, and people’s purchase power went down, but none of that is due to public expenditure. I’m personally European so I can tell you about the reasons for inflation:

1. Spike in energy prices as a consequence of the war in Ukraine

2. Problems in supply of goods as a consequence of COVID bottlenecks

3. Companies rising prices more than would be necessary to just maintain profit, in order to get more profits by riding the wave of inflation

Like, these are known, studied, measured effects, it’s not even a discussion in serious academia that these are the reason, they can even quantify by how much. Just think about it, inflation happened widespread across the world. If it had been a monetary phenomenon, it would have been confined to specific currencies, the policy in the US (dollars) was very different as that on Canada (Canadian Dollars) or in the UK (Pounds) or in the EU (Euros) or in Japan (yen).

Again, I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be smug or a smartass here, but I’m not missing any points.

Government has only one way to raise revenue, taxes

A government doesn’t need revenue. As I said, a government like the US creates its own currency in whichever arbitrary amount it decides, whenever it wants. A government can spend as much as it wants in its own currency, without raising taxes first, and without going into debt. Want more doctors? It can create dollars to pay them. Want more roads? More dollars. You get the point.

My point isn’t that taxes are useless, they’re useful for several things such as forcing the private sector to use your currency (since they have to pay taxes with it). They’re useful to disincentivize certain behaviours (alcohol and tobacco taxes), to boost your industry and internal market (import taxes). And even better, they can be a great tool to reduce inequality (taxes on wealth, progressive taxes on income, taxes on inheritance, higher VAT for luxury products…). Another important thing they do is removing money from the private sector, this is important to prevent macroeconomic imbalances, you can’t have ONLY government expenditure without taxes.

But the thing is, we CAN pay for things without taxes. Government budgets don’t have any real reason to be linked to either debt, or taxes. And in fact as I mentioned already, they pay for lots of things without debt or taxes. They pay for wars this way, they pay for bank bailouts this way, they pay for COVID emergency measures this way. A government can pay ALL of its debt without raising A SINGLE dollar in taxes from the citizens. Why they don’t do that, is actually a good question.

Sadly, the right wing and neoliberalism have convinced us somehow that “governments budgets are paid by taxes”, when it’s backwards. The private sector can’t have dollars without the government creating them first. Budget deficits aren’t bad. In fact they’re so normal that they happen in every developed country every year, and they’re a GOOD THING! Yes, government budget deficit is a good thing for us! We’re the private sector. The ONLY way for the private sector to be able to have more money circulating or in savings, is if the state CREATES this money and spends it first in the private sector. If a government has more revenue than expenditure one year, they’re literally extracting currency from the economy, how’s that a good thing?

The hard and interesting question then isn’t “how are we gonna pay for things?”. Paying for things is very easy for the state, literally just create the dollars. The question is: how much deficit should we be running? How much deficit is the best for the economy? And where should be running this deficit, maybe less for military and more for healthcare and education and pensions and infrastructure?

The question on taxation shouldn’t be “how are we gonna pay for it?” But rather “how much money should we remove from the economy”? Or “what behaviours should the government disincentivize?” Or “where in the economy do we want to extract currency to reduce inequality?” “Should we be charging lower taxes on poor people and higher taxes on richer people and on big companies?”

This reality-based understanding of government budgets, deficits, debt creation, money creation and taxation, instead of the neoliberal dogma, opens up so many cans of worms and exposed so many non-issues. I’ll say it again: “GOVERNMENT BUDGET DEFICITS AND DEBT AREN’T A BAD THING”.

Again, it’s not cavalier attitude, I’m at least as much of a leftist as you are, it’s just an explanation of the economics of the state and the public sector.

Who pays the interest? The government. Where does that money go? A combination of private sector of this country and others, and the public sector of other countries, basically anyone who wants to buy public debt. Myself included btw. I’m not paying interest on my country’s debt, my country is paying me interest on the debt I purchased from it.

I’m purely talking about public debt, not private debt. Unless someone in the private sector can get indebted in a currency they create and control, then they can’t pay for it immediately and without cost. It’s just that when people discuss the problem of national debt they’re usually talking about the debt of the public sector.

Thanks for checking it and the update, that’s cool of you

While I fully agree with the sentiment of your comment, I need to remark that national debt is a non-issue. The central bank of the US, in this case the Federal Reserve, is the one and only entity in planet Earth with the power to create dollars at will. It doesn’t even need to print them, since money now is mostly digital, they can be created at a keystroke on a keyboard.

As long as the national debt is denominated in USD, which it is, the US will never have a problem with debt payments, it could literally pay it all back early tomorrow pressing a keyboard 3 times, and it would cost taxpayers a grand total of $0.

Debt is simply a useful tool for other reasons, like being able to control the interest rate of loans the economy (as we saw during the recent increase enacted to attempt fighting inflation), but public expenditure isn’t reliant on debt or even on taxes, since the government can create an arbitrarily large amount of dollars. The desirable amount to be created should be discussed with scientific evidence in hand, or even modulated over time responding to the markets and the situation of the economy and inflation, but debt is absolutely not a limit on public expenditure. The US could create as many dollars as desired to pay for infrastructure or social support (as it did during the very successful new deal, or the pandemic cheques, or rescuing silicon valley banks).

The fact that it’s standard practice doesn’t make it non-stupid. Bullfighting in my country, Spain, is pretty stupid and unfortunately in some areas it’s general practice.

The very concept of a patent is tenuous: “no, you can’t make this, this is MY idea and I get to decide who profits by how much and who enjoys my invention”. When applied to medicine, it’s downright immoral and murderous. Even with negotiation of drug prices, you end up with things like the Hepatitis C curing drug costing several tens of thousands of Euros per patient even in European countries, whereas it costs less than one tenth of that in some others. It’s just this is paid by the state and not by the end user so it’s not as Machiavellian as in the USA, but it’s still extremely fucked.

If you want some of the few examples of countries that don’t follow the “standard practice”, you can look at Cuba being the first country in the world to double-vaccinate 95+% of their population with the COVID vaccine. How? State-funded research, and state-funded vaccine manufacturing, with the primary objective of vaccinating as many as possible as early as possible, instead of the profit motive as the driver.

This is only partially true. Not all trees, and not even most trees, have exclusively one gender. There’s not that much scientific evidence supporting your claim of a conscious effort to plant certain gendered trees resulting in exponentially higher levels of pollen

Human societies have an upper limit on the amount of population they can sustain, determined by their access to natural resources, technology, and social organization

But that would be represented in this analogy by a limited size on the top half of the hourglass, not the bottom one.

On a social-rights level, sure, they’re awesome. If you like TST, I bet you love activism for worker’s rights! Consider joining and participating in your workplace’s union, and a more widespread union movement that encompasses all workers, such as the Industrial Workers of the World union!

Protesting what exactly?

Protesting monster trucks becoming the default go-to vehicle to go run an errand or drive to work. You don’t need a “child-destroyer-3000: now Electric!” taking 3 lanes of width, weighing 20 tonnes, and occupying 4 parking spots, to go to your bakery or pick up the kids from school.

What exactly is moral about vandalizing these cars?

If certain vehicles end up costing more to manufacture/protect/repaint than the revenue upon sale, the company will stop manufacturing them. Same idea as deflating SUV wheels which are parked on the street: make lives for SUV drivers inconvenient so people won’t want an SUV.

Also this notion that protests are only effective if they’re disruptive is a myth. If that was the case then the George Floyd Riots would’ve led somewhere or the pro Palestinian encampments would’ve led somewhere or all those climate protesters damaging historical monuments and art would’ve led somewhere or all those animal rights activists blocking streets would’ve led somewhere… but they haven’t. All they’ve done is lead people to resent them.

“What did the resistance to Nazi occupation by the Polish people lead to? It didn’t work, genocide happened anyway, and all they did is making Nazis resent them”.

I’m sure you’re aware that people engage in challenges they don’t know for certain they can achieve, right?

Eat his pizza, form a union