It’s all a pretty half-hearted way to address the obvious:
We printed something like 7 trillion dollars, which is about 28k per adult.
If you and everyone you know are not 28k richer than you were before COVID, then someone has your money.
It’s probably someone rich. And you know what the rich do with more money? They don’t spend it on goods and services. They buy assets, to make them even more money — money that comes from you.
It’s like Gary’s Economics says in The Changing Shape of Great Britain: When the rich own all the wealth, ordinary people can’t work for each other, so they have to work for the rich to make goods that are sold to the rich.
The International Criminal Court prosecutor said Monday that he has requested arrest warrants for the leaders of Hamas and for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel....
I love how economic reporting is always framed as “these quirky little consumers’ wacky proclivities!” and not the inevitable consequences of increasingly-concentrated wealth.
I feel there now has to be a distinction made between “Capital Libertarians” and “Individual Libertarians”.
You might be interested in Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty”.
Basically, there is no absolute thing called “liberty”, because anything you do changes the material world and the state of the material world also shapes what you’re able to do. So you can’t talk about simply “liberty”, and must always describe it in terms of those two relationships. What Berlin calls “freedom to” and “freedom from”.
For instance, I might consider my liberty to mean that I have the “freedom to” shoot a gun in the air. My neighbors might consider their liberty to mean that they have the “freedom from” falling bullets.
We can’t create a policy which guarantees both “freedom to” and “freedom from” for all people. But we can create a policy that guarantees both for some people. We just have to allow that some people get to enjoy both the rights and the protections, while other people lack the rights and must suffer the consequences of others’ actions.
And that might be why the contemporary conservative version of so-called “libertarianism” plays so well with a notion of a superior social class, whether that’s economic, religious, or racial. You can invoke the word “liberty” in support of your attempts to bully others, and then you can invoke it again as a protection against others’ attempts to bully you.
Major consumer divide: The rich keep spending, as poorer Americans struggle (www.axios.com)
Meme Manager needed... (lemmy.world)
Average U.S. vehicle age hits record 12.6 years as high prices force people to keep them longer (www.nbcnews.com)
its still deprecated (lemmy.world)
Scarlett Johansson denied OpenAI the right to use her voice. They used it anyway. (boingboing.net)
Lefty Nemesis (i.redd.it)
International Criminal Court Prosecutor Requests Warrants for Netanyahu and Hamas Leaders (www.nytimes.com)
The International Criminal Court prosecutor said Monday that he has requested arrest warrants for the leaders of Hamas and for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel....
The lunch rush is dead as Americans live for the weekend, office workers are pinching lunchtime pennies (www.nbcnews.com)
Honestly, this is probably how I will end up dieing (sh.itjust.works)
If you are a Libertarian and hold liberty as your core value, why do you not believe in universal healthcare? Nothing impacts liberty more than sickness and death.
Torso™ (sh.itjust.works)
it's shrimply unbelievable (rule) (lemmy.blahaj.zone)