politics

No, I didn’t mean climate science hasn’t been replicated.

We are discussing climate science, so this wasn’t relevant at all. Specifically we are discussing climate science in the context of Chris Murphy’s assertion that we need to embrace climate science skeptics and other people on the right. A populist movement will be able to bring uniformed or even misled people into a broader movement without needing to compromise on any of the social, cultural, gun and climate issues listed in his tweets. The Democratic Party needs to build a populist narrative that will attract people into a coalition, not continue the failed strategy of trying to grab moderate Republicans while alienating progressives and socialists.

The above paragraph is what is relevant to the discussion at hand. I thought it was fair to exchange a general list of positions since part of the topic is coalition building. I am going ahead and responding to most of these topics, because what we as individuals need to be doing is educating ourselves and others.

Also, I’m not google, and I don’t always have the free time to respond. If we dive too deep into any of them we will miss the point of this discussion and the lengths of our comments will get too long. If you want to go deeper into any of these topics, I recommend starting a post in Ask Lemmy or another relevant community. As it is I am going to have to break this reply into multiple comments because we’ve hit the capacity for comments with our discussion.

for COVID they also needed to trust a wider apparatus that included government.

The anti-vax movement, which has existed for centuries, is the reason the COVID misinformation was so widespread.

https://www.verywellhealth.com/history-anti-vaccine-movement-4054321

If someone trusts the institutions only while their party holds them, they cannot be said to trust the institutions.

For many people, if not most people, these are one in the same. The idea that institutions themselves are what need to be changed is seemingly unintuitive in today’s society.

Yes, I think the main objection lately is only who controls them.

There are people who want a dictator that agrees with them.

Do you mean something beyond my “safety net”?

Fear of losing customers, and therefore revenue, may prompt business owners to allow outdated payments. By not enforcing price increases for all clients, businesses ultimately will lose money as they struggle to satisfy unreasonable customers rather than focus on clients willing to pay the current rates.

Best business practices involve not doing business with ‘unreasonable’ people who won’t pay higher rates. Unreasonable is a cute way of saying a person cannot afford to pay more. I’m sure for some businesses who only deal with rich people this advice seems harmless. But when it’s the same advice that a landlord would use when raising rent it goes from cute to making people homeless. In a capitalist society, it isn’t profitable to target the lowest income brackets. Especially when the initial investment the business needs to make is in new buildings.

https://postpressmag.com/articles/2015/top-5-reasons-to-fire-a-customer/

As far as I know, tech is the main area we don’t already do this, just because it’s relatively new.

The majority of the industries in the U.S. have oligopolies that are dominated by a few large corporations. This creates significant barriers to entry for those wishing to enter the marketplace.

We aren’t doing this enough in every sector. Tech is a noticeable example of this.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/121514/what-are-some-current-examples-oligopolies.asp

I’m partial to a “death tax” (estate tax) myself.

Waiting for billionaires to die will take too long. We needed wealth redistribution decades ago. Billionaires have access to the best health care money can buy and they are in no hurry to die.

Even then, I think there is a risk of capital flight that needs to be mitigated somehow.

When it comes to tax policy, Congress has broad latitude to enact policy as it sees fit, within constitutional limitations, of course. And to that point, the constitutionality of retroactive income tax changes is well-settled. They are allowed.

More recently, in cases such as United States v. Hemme, Welch v. Henry, and most notably, United States v. Carlton, the U.S. Supreme Court has reaffirmed that both income and transfer tax (e.g., estate and gift taxes) changes may be implemented retroactively, “Provided that the retroactive application of a statute is supported by a legitimate legislative purpose furthered by rational means…”

We have the capacity to write tax laws that do not give legal windows for capital flight and we have the capacity to enforce those tax laws. The US legally freezes assets, usually as part of sanctions, routinely. We need the political will to do so.

Also, we are currently spending more money than the next nine countries combined on defense spending. We are logistically capable of stopping billionaires who attempt to illegally move assets out of the country. The 2024 article is more recent but the 2020 article does have some interesting comparisons with the rest of the world.

We also need to cut defense spending, because it’s taking money from education and essential services. Not to mention electing a dictator who does whatever other dictators want is bad for national security and military readiness. So not educating people is actually bad for national security and military readiness since an uneducated populace is easier for a christo-fascist dictator to manipulate to take power.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreylevine/2021/06/11/can-congress-really-increase-taxes-retroactively/

https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-spends-more-on-defense-than-the-next-9-countries-combined/

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2020/04/30/us-spends-military-spending-next-10-countries-combined/

I don’t trust that you can actually do this without triggering a catastrophe. I would be more interested if it were structured as incremental reforms.

It’s not an issue of trust. It’s an issue of understanding ideas and math. This is the prevalence of neoliberal ideas my argument references. Incremental reforms will not work because the owner class will always take measures to thwart them. This is because they will always be incentivized to behave that way. And as long as they have the money to do so, they will be able to act on those incentives, both economically and politically. There is no catastrophe that will be triggered if rich people are less rich and everyone else is better off. Instead we would see economic prosperity.

Eh… You might as well say it would be cool if we could all be Vulcans.

This attitude could have been used to dismiss any technology. Star Trek popularized the idea of computer tablets. Now we have tablets. The humans in Star Trek live in a post-scarcity society. If we don’t dismiss it out of hand, people could be living in such a society or comparable society in the future. In real life the answer might not be replicators, but more equitable and inclusive political and economic institutions.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/09/how-star-trek-artists-imagined-the-ipad-23-years-ago/

I might fight you on the particulars… I like efficiency and simplicity, but redundancy can be valuable in critical systems.

If the costs of the redundancy outweigh the benefits we should remove the redundancy. The redundant elements of society are billionaires and millionaires. As long as we use a market base system people are going to amass a certain amount of wealth that can easily stretch into the tens of millions. Billionaires have billions does not add anything to the economy. Having an investor class with tens or hundreds of millions that give loans can allow for new small businesses to take off. But we need to regulate these investments and eventually replace them with other systems or else investors will amass too much wealth.

That argument against the states only works so long as the federal government is trustworthy, though.

It works as long the federal government is representative of the majority of people.

I’m not including the debt that is important for the weird-ass way the global economy works now.

That’s what deficit spending is. The US is not a household. Deficit spending is a strategy and is not inherently irresponsible or responsible.

Does anyone do it like you want? I agree that we need healthcare reform, but I don’t generally see glowing reviews of other systems either.

There are currently 17 countries that offer single-payer healthcare: Norway, Japan, United Kingdom, Kuwait, Sweden, Bahrain, Canada, United Arab Emirates, Denmark, Finland, Slovenia, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus, Spain, and Iceland.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-with-single-payer

This is mostly a budget thing IMO. If you can set aside funds for it, go ahead. If you can’t, that’s society deciding this is not worth doing.

This is an issue of political will. As the Republican Party wants to rule, not lead, having an uneducated population makes their job of deceiving people easier. Trump is notorious for his comment on loving the poorly educated.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-love-poorly-educated/