But what about the billionaires? Who’s helping them out, huh?
Oh how will they SURVIVE???
WHAT IF:
We didn’t rely on a system that requires infinite growth to make shareholders money that drives under- and unemployment in order to make those profits?
Dear capitalists: If your excuse that you can’t ‘survive’ (actual excuse I’ve heard from capitalists) without gouging people, your system is busted.
This meme format is the same as the Lisa one.
What if:
- Our government didn’t have the ability to print money? What if going to war meant raising taxes?
- We took the control of the money supply out of their hands and instead used free and open source software to create money and move it around?
- Our economy wasn’t predicated on a target 2-3% inflation rate? What if you were not incentivized to spend your money because it’s just losing value every day you don’t spend it? How might our consumption/production patterns change? How might that impact sustainability?
- The government couldn’t move money from the 99% to the 1% every time a bank needed to be bailed out? What if they didn’t print away all the value of money you earned? What if when the economy grew, the value of your money increased just as it would naturally if somebody wasn’t printing away the difference?
How might the world look different?
Small but steady inflation is good. The macroeconomic fear is that people will just hold onto their money in the form of raw currency. That’s bad. Currency is for a more convenient representation of value. I can’t compensate a roofer in computer code, so currency is a stand-in. But it also shouldn’t languish or else the economy stagnates. The world used to regularly experience zero inflation or deflation, which hurt the economy. As much as we’ve had some instability lately, things are nowhere near as bad as they could be.
Of course the flip side - hyperinflation - is also bad, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
Good for who? Where does value move when your currency is reduced in value by an expansion in the supply? To regular people? No. Lower and middle class people are the ones who have the most cash, they have a higher ratio of cash to net worth than rich people who can put their money into assets. They have an emergency fund. They are saving up to become property owners.
Humanity survived and grew total economic output for millennia before inflationary paper currency came around. Inflationary paper currency is a relatively recent phenomenon. I’m not saying we should go back to the gold standard, but that ended in 1971. That’s pretty recent.
If you live in a hyperinflation environment, you will spend your money on anything because it’s better than holding onto that money and see it become worthless. It might seem silly to own 12 blenders, but buying yet another blender is a better investment than simply sitting on your money for a month in Turkey. At least a blender can blend and maybe be re-sold at a later date. That effect still happens in mildly inflationary economies: we are incentivized to buy goods and services we don’t need because the alternative is just slowly watching our money lose value. This is not a great incentive to have baked into our financial system when we live on a planet with finite resources.
On the other hand, if your money is expected to retain or gain value, somebody has to really convince you to part with it. Does that mean products are built to last? Built more repairable or sustainable? Perhaps. You will still buy things of course, everybody needs stuff, but at least the incentive is trending in the right direction instead of towards needless consumption.
It’s existed since slavery. Thinly veiled with ‘we’re an individualistic society’ and ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’.
OR ELSE…!
You’ll be happy with what you got.
This presupposes that there aren’t extensively connected sociopaths in your community.
Why?
Because greedy, selfish assholes are very, very good at abusing and ruining a society for their own benefit. Keeping them out of the way and from making trouble is the only way the kind of society OP posted about would have any chance to survive long-term.
We really need to find a way to do that. Maybe entice them away with a kingship on Mars, or something?
I think you just need equal power and more horizontal structures, nothing to abuse then.
I think the solution is for all the non assholes to work together to stamp out the assholes and remove them from having power. Incredibly difficult, but not impossible. It’s the same class war that’s been waged by the wealthy for decades. Theyve never stopped attacking, we just suck at working together and have allowed them to gain waaaay too much ground.
They’re always going to be on the bus, but we can at least push them to the back where they can’t fuck with where we want to go.
…were you going to suggest a solution or are we going to finger our assholes all and do what ifs… what if I was a princess in faraway land? ☺️
Maybe we should share tools, so people can’t use ownership as power to oppress others. Just a thought
Thank you sir or madam. A well thought out statement.
