I’m old enough to remember the Reagan years. They absolutely sucked. I also voted for and was happy with Clinton. That said, in hind sight, Reagan set the house on fire, but the deregulation during the Clinton years threw a barrel of napalm into it to help it along. 1980-2000 is when we destroyed it all.
If Gore had won the presidency, things would have turned out very differently. And let’s not forget that things worked out quite well for a while under Clinton.
Same with Reagan (for some). When you rip out the brakes you get to go fast, which is great, until you need to turn or avoid a brick wall.
The positive effects of deregulation are instantaneous, which is great for the current administration. The shit hitting the fan takes its time, which is bad for later administrations.
EDIT: Gore did win. Never forget that.
Gore did win
Echos of QAnon?
When the votes cast were actually counted in Florida, Gore had more. FL was called for Bush before then, and the SCOTUS ruled 5-4 that what they initially called should stand.
None of that matters, all that matters was the final call that he lost
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Things only worked out well for those not paying attention. Clinton was horrible
Well, that’s because Clinton and every Democratic President since has been an Eisenhower Republican. Hilary campaigned for Barry Fuckin’ Goldwater.
The Clintons also laid the groundwork for scaling up the prison population to boost slave labour and poors suppression.
Something the republicans gladly inherited.
I’m not old enough to have voted, but I remember the last few of the Reagan years, when his dementia was just as obvious as McConnell’s or Feinsten’s.
Wilson started it, Roosevelt and Eisenhower propped it up, inadvertently or not, Nixon continued it, and Reagan paved the way for the shit we see today.
Let’s not forget to give Nixon his due, and the evil bastards that made Citizens United a law.
And Jude Wanniski, author of The Two Santa Claus Theory, which has become the backbone of Republican stupidity ever since.
And let’s not forget Rupert fucking Murdoch.
Rupert Murdoch wouldn’t have been a thing if Reagan hadn’t ended the fairness doctrine. Rupert Murdoch is Reagan’s fault.
Bill Clinton gave us Murdoch with his telecom act. Before Clinton, Murdoch wouldn’t have been able to own Fox News in the US because foreign nationals couldn’t own US news providers
Woah. Never knew that was illegal before. We need that law back.
or the fucking Koch brothers, or the Mercers
That’s the biggest problem with a social democracy, it just takes one bad faith actor supported by Capital owners to completely derail the system of social safety nets that were built with good faith over almost 200 years…
Good faith is a bit of a weird way to say exploitation, slavery, genocide and war in the global south
I was more referring to good faith governance (govermeny working for its citizens best interests and not corporations), not saying that social democracy aren’t fueled by those sources. But fuxk me for not writing an essay decrying every crime of social democracy’s lmao my bad.
Np you’ll get it right next time
That being said, it wasn’t good faith that gave us those safety nets, it was the working class picking up arms and demanding it.
It seems that what you mean is social democracy broadly fails to meet the needs of the working class because it binds out fate to the exercise of ruling power.
I had no idea Reagan was responsible for people not knowing how to use capital letters.
Edit: Reagan was, apparently, also responsible for people misspelling Reagan. 🫣
The War on Education started with Reagan! It tracks
yeAh capItal leTters aRe liKe caPital ciTies, thEy beLong nEar tHe cenTer.
United States of America has left the chat.
You gotta wait for the capitals to trickle down
THIS BUT UNIRONICALLY
tHis buT uNironIcally
The bailout system we have now, starting in 2008, is way worse than any reaganomics. Now we just hand them cash and don’t even expect it to trickle down.
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Unfortunately, since apolitical money is not meaningful as a concept, any viable solution to ineffectual political processes must entail repairing if not reconstituting such processes within the political frame.
Gold was apolitical money for a long time. Can’t just print gold.
Gold has use value. It is and has been traded for its use value, which is the same value whether or not it is designated as currency.
The decision to designate gold as currency, or a standard for currency, is political.
Thus, gold is natural, and naturally useful, and may be designated as currency politically.
Cryptocurrency has no natural or intrinsic value, no use value.
Unlike the trade of gold, the trade of cryptocurrency depends on a belief that it is currency. Yet, it is not currency, because it has not been designated as currency politically. Once the realization is made that the necessary political process to designate it as currency will never occur, the will to trade is lost.
Ben Bernanke.
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Satoshi saw this and knew there was a better way, so he created a new currency system in which no one person or organization could ever have the power to just turn on the money printer like that ever again. Because the temptation is just too strong.
Ethereum Classic proves this is a fantasy. There is no such thing as apolitical money. You’re trading a government who you have limited influence over for a group of programmers who you have no influence over. If something happens which hurts the programmers of your currency enough they will change the code. Just like they did with Ethereum classic.
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#1. Ethereum is not designed to have a fixed supply like Bitcoin is.
Which is why Bitcoin in hyper-deflationary, which is a insane economic policy for any serious fiat currency. That policy can be changed in code by programmers just like lawmakers can change economic policy for national fiats. Bitcoin might be taken slightly more seriously as currency rather than a speculative asset if they removed the fixed supply. But that would hurt the existing wealthy stakeholders. Are you starting to see how this is still political?
The difference is that the law makers are in principle — though usually not in practice — supposed to represent the interests of everyone. There are no such lofty ideals on the chain. Whatever group controls the most wealth controls the chain. Its like our government in 2008 but with no pretense of serving everyone.
Ethereum programmers implemented a rollback on the chain in the code early on because many wealthy people close to the project lost money through an attack and needed to be bailed out… like the government did for Wall Street in 2008. The fact that its possible for the programmers to rollback the chain completely undermines the concept that crypto is decentralized in a way that meaningfully solves the problems it claims to. Wealthy players will exert their influence on crypto just like wealthy players did on the US dollar in 2008.
The fact that Ethereum Classic still exists demonstrates that there was not a consensus with the rollback — there was discontent with the rollback — just like people were discontent with the bailouts in 2008.
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I would say it’s mildly deflationary, the supply is fixed, it’s not like 10% of the supply is burned every year or anything.
This is like saying tulip mania was mildly deflationary. At a certain point without changing the rules of the blockchain there will never be another Bitcoin made. That is somehow supposed to represent an ever growing economy forever?… And not be hyper-deflationary? Remember… they were still making more tulips.
As long as Bitcoin remains this deflationary it will be a terrible store of value and a terrible facilitator of trade. In other words a terrible currency. And the people in charge of bitcoin — that is the people who own stakes in the network — will never want to end that because they make too much money with it being deflationary. It would be funny if some people didn’t loose a ton of money in the process.
I’m not making the argument that economic systems are divorced from politics or don’t have political or social implications. They obviously do.
If its not divorced from politics then what’s to stop the same or similar political situation that happened in 2008 from happening again?
Remember the thing I disagreed with was…
Satoshi saw this and knew there was a better way, so he created a new currency system in which no one person or organization could ever have the power to just turn on the money printer like that ever again. Because the temptation is just too strong.
If the rules can be changed by someone then what’s to stop whoever that someone is from turning on the money printers on for the wealthy under the right political circumstances?
Sorry but you’re just wrong about the rollback and how that works. The only reason the rollback worked is because the majority of the Ethereum network nodes and miners agreed it was needed.
I understand how it works. I used to mine Ethereum and I’ve run both a Bitcoin and Ethereum nodes. I’ve been following Bitcoin since I saw it on slashdot in 2009.
Of course they “agreed” to give themselves a bailout. That’s no more valid of an argument than saying the US agreed to the bailouts in 2008. Other’s disagreed that’s why we still have the fork.
Randomly forking is terrible for a currency. I don’t want to wake up tomorrow and find out that my money is worth half as much because some rich assholes didn’t like some transactions. And because they own enough nodes/ASICs/GPUs/stake and are friends with the programmers on the project they can just fork me over.
They can directly vote on proposed rule changes unlike in a representative democracy where they elect people who can change those rules and in most cases the only recourse if they make bad rules is to elect somebody different next time.
Most representative democracies have direct ballot initiatives and they’re based on 1 person 1 vote. We should work to have more of that because a broad base of people generally have interests different than those with access to wealth.
In the case of crypto none that I know of base their “democracy” on a system of 1 person 1 vote but instead on how much ownership you have on the network in terms of nodes/Mines(GPU, ASICs, etc.)/stake. This is not democracy, this is a system of political power based on ownership. In other words the same system of influence at the root of the 2008 bailouts.
There have been many proposals to change Bitcoin’s core protocol over the years, most of them did not succeed as they required widespread consensus which is hard to get and takes significant time.
Yes, the people who own stakes in the blockchain are going to make very conservative decisions that protect their own wealth. The US congress chose to turn the money printer on in 2008 because that was the best way to protect their wealth and the wealth of their donors. Again… its same system of influence based on wealth and ownership that lead to the 2008 bailouts.
There are pretty substantial ghouls that preceded Reaganomics: chartered monopolies, anonymous transferable shares of companies (thinking Dutch East India Company here), prohibition of local currencies, central banking, labor theory of property
And that succeeded Reaganomics: Chokepoint capitalism, evergreen IP, the gig economy
Yes, in a proximate sense, specifically in the US, Reagan broke a lot of dams that were holding back the most calamitous floods that were poised to drown us… but he didn’t fill them with water in the first place.
I’m partial to blaming European colonialism myself.
I blame the wrong side winning at Thermopylae.
Ronald Reagan is proof that most actors should not become politicians.
You get too good at pretending to be somebody you’re not when it is your actual day job.
Have you caught yourself doing that?
Does anyone have any book/article recommendations if I’m unfamiliar with this topic, but may want to start down this rabbit hole?
More than emphasizing the figure of Reagan, I suggest learning about neoliberalism overall, and its emergence as the global order.
Frankly, Reagan was just a simpleton in a suit, by my estimation.
Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman are the more relevant figures historically.
I’m not familiar with books on Reagan but if you want a great book on how the right wing billionaires manipulate things with money I suggest Dark Money by Jane Meyer. It’s in the same vein and dark money is a highly interesting topic.
And left wing billionaries don’t manipulate, they are good guys?
Start with The Shock Doctrine from Naomi Klein
The best thing he did was marry the Throat GOAT.
That absolutely slays me.
If it wasn’t Reagan it was Biden
