Absolutely.

The basics of liberalism as we see it today - rule of law and representative democracy, are young. How many presently-unthinkable violations of liberalism were committed by a Western nation within the lifespan of someone who is 90 today, with full public support? Outright genocide, systematic persecution and disenfranchisement of whole races and genders, violent militarised colonialism, you name it.

Building a just state and society is a slow, delicate, multi-generational project of structural and cultural modification, and we are just at the beginning. We're just now getting to a place where we're moving past barbaric mass violence and mass racist persecution.

It's like people look around, notice that we're not in fact in some enlightened Star Trek utopia, declare the whole edifice rotten, and decide that the best response is to gleefully burn it all down.

It's easy to forget that what we understand now as a liberal democracy with free press, rule of law and the right for everyone to vote is extremely young.

Just look at the time when women were granted voting rights (1).

The US, by some seen as the 'holy grail' of modern democracy, officially allowed women to vote in 1919 (ironically many of the Democratic party were opposed), had extensive voter supression such as literacy tests until the 60ies and arguably still does today.

Many European countries were not real Democracies until after WW2, or event until the fall of the soviet union.

60-70, or even 100 years is basically nothing. That's one long lifespan.

Let's see if we see it all go down in flames in our lifetimes. (Probably not. Let's hope not).

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage

No one except Americans themselves see the USA as the holy grail of modern democracy. That honor would probably befall one of either the West European or Scandinavian countries.

Yup, Norway is on the top of 2016's democracy index https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Democracy_in...

The Democratic party of 1919 did not have the same modern liberalist principles of the Democratic party of today. The parties are not static entities with the same principles extending back to their founding.

Yeah I know, that also wasn't meant as a criticism to the current DNC, it's more about the word 'Democratic party'.

You have to appreciate the irony of a `Democrat` filibustering a woman voting rights act.

But that's our current view. Reading press articles from back then when this issue was discussed in many countries in Europe is quite entertaining also.

I was afraid of the whole burning down thing as well. The protests and outrage around the US have made me a lot more hopeful though.

> basics of liberalism as we see it today - rule of law and representative democracy

Add capitalist property relations though too.

There's a name for this which escapes me. It happens to individuals a lot. It goes like this:

"In today's news, Person A has made a sizable, significant contribution of Something to help Subset B of The Overwhelming Problem. But, one has to ask: What about The Rest of The Overwhelming Problem? Why doesn't Person A care about any of that!?"

The issue is that you provided the media with a headline they need, but not one they want. You gave them "Things are getting better, but it's complicated". But, what readers respond to is one of "15 reasons you should be afraid, here's who to blame" or "Everything is magically fixed in a single soundbite".

It's Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics.

https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

"The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster."

Thanks for sharing this. It is now bookmarked at the top of my "wisdom" folder :)

It's easier to complain than it is to fix, but I also think that's why people don't offer solutions more readily. Solutions are iterative and difficult. If you offer small solutions you put yourself out there to be criticized for the solution not being enough, and if you offer large ones, you open yourself up to criticism that the solution is unrealistic. This is why so few people go into politics and why it can be so dysfunctional in a hyper connected society. All is criticism.

In my perspective, the issue is less that the critics decline to offer alternative realistic solutions, but rather that they seek to repackage discredited and harmful solutions (like supply-side economics) as being the correct fix if only it gets implemented correctly and without opposition meddling.

This line of argument is also often used to whitewash Communism by saying things along the line of: "Communism would work just fine if it wasn't implemented poorly like the way China or the Soviet Union did."

It's rather troubling that in such a connected and technologically advanced age, we can't seem help ourselves from looking to the past to organize ourselves for the future.

Perhaps part of the problem is our desire to bundle solutions into grand theories, like supply-side economics or Marxism? I agree that we can beat a horse over and over again until there's nothing left to see, but small changes are how the world actually works. I can say "lowering taxes on producers of x can stimulate growth" or "increased public investment in industry y will resolve the problems it currently experiences" and those things occur all the time. But they also don't sell books.

EDIT: Perhaps a better way of stating this is our desire to package academically useful economic models into grand policy solutions.

Yes, I think it's a big part of the problem. Packaging things together and discussing them as ideologies, instead of stripping them to components and evaluating each component on its merits.

This is exactly it. It's also a good approach when constructively criticising technical solutions. But we tend to like silver bullets too much.

Those are almost always No True Scotsman fallacies. Supply-side failed because it wasn't supply-side enough. Etc.

It's not unlike abstinence-only birth control.

Practiced perfectly, yes, abstinence is 100% effective at preventing pregnancy. There is no question about that.

And yes, some small fraction of people do manage to practice complete abstinence, and reap the benefit of not getting pregnant.

But as a policy, abstinence only for broad swaths of the population is a total disaster.

Offtopic-ish:

> some small fraction of people do manage to practice complete abstinence

I actually think it's a pretty large fraction, but they do it out of inability to secure a mate. The people for whom supply and demand curves never cross.

It's much harder to reason why a person capable of having a life will choose to not to.

Communism's "discreditation" was the result of a decades long propaganda campaign and their descent into authoritarianism which isn't all that different to that which many capitalist countries went through (or some are currently going through).

You hear plenty of "well, capitalism would work fine too if it were just implemented correctly". That's exactly as stupid.

First point, yes on propaganda, but the failure of the Soviet Union had more to do with the inherent limitations of central planning than Marxist communism. That doesn't mean communism is a broken ideology, but rather that by attempting to refine the designs of failed communist states risks going back on the same path, instead of envisioning a new model for a community-focused ideology (in a way different from capitalist overthrow->authoritarianism->"communism").

Capitalism lends itself more towards authoritarianism, in my opinion, as the compound interest function of accumulated wealth works similarly with power. For example, wealthy Republicans support Republican politicians who lower their donors' taxes and entrench their party's power through gerrymandering and voter suppression (such as purged voter rolls, or deliberately understaffed polling places in areas with more opposition party voters).

There are various new approaches to central planning that may be of interest, such as those in Towards a New Socialism by W. Paul Cockshott. I don't think central planning is necessarily something bad, and there are certainly sufficient alternatives from both inside and outside Communism. Many Communists such as myself are not attached to one method or another.

The idea that some period of authoritarianism is required for Communism is quite a Leninist idea. Sometimes I feel as though Communism would work better as an ideal to strive toward, rather than necessarily something to be acheived. I don't know how others feel on this, though.

I agree on the second paragraph. In general, one cannot decree a better world. It must be a conscious decision for people to work towards their ideals. Authoritarianism cannot fix that and even a benevolent AI overlord would be limited in its ability to manage production and allocate resources as a means to make life better for all people.

In general I am dismal at the ability for overthrow to enact lasting change. It often descends into a brutal struggle to keep newfound power, which becomes more important than the ideals themselves. The American Revolution ("All men are created equal") failed to end slavery, among other shortcomings. The French Revolution was a bloody mess that was only pacified by dictatorship and monarchy. Haiti, most tragic of all, was the only successful slave rebellion and they've been paying for it ever since, both as a result of foreign meddling as well as by greed and power-lust from their own leaders.

If communism could just be boiled down to "laborers own the means of production" then what stops that from happening within capitalism?

What prevents people from banding together to create factories that they then work in, for example?

These factories must compete with others which value profit as the highest motive. So because there is still a profit motive, the co-op factory must optimise on two fronts: money in order to keep itself afloat and still purchase the required capital (and labour power), and further to operate by "ethical" principles toward the workers (whatever those may be).

Thus co-ops will have a tendency to fail within capitalism, because they usually cannot compete sufficiently. In addition, unless everyone worked in co-ops, there would still be worker exploitation, and thus still need for Communism (in the eyes of Socialists). This is especially true in developing countries.

Exploitation happens at a class level, not an individual level, nor the co-op level. It is pervasive.

Okay, but this competition is a benefit to the consumer, so you're arguing that the consumers should eschew this benefit in favor of "ethical" factories. From what you're saying you seem to believe consumers largely refuse to do this, so you would have to remove this choice from them completely.

The problem then(also identified by communists of old..) is that you can't compete with forces outside your control - so you either need a global communist revolution, or you need pretty strict isolationism.

Since you never convinced your consumers that ethical factories are worth supporting, how do you plan to deal with the resentment they feel when they see the wealth foreigners posses achieved through the harsher competition policies of capitalism? Will you be suppressing information and limiting access to the Internet? Maybe some propaganda pieces about how your ethical factories are better than slavery under capitalism?

Maybe the "horror stories" of communism were caused by its flawed leaders more than the ideology itself. But it seems that a lot of stuff that we wouldn't really be happy with needs to happen in order to implement "perfect communism".

You forget what profit is. Profit is (the monetary value of) the benefit to society of the product being produced.

Now when you say "must optimize on two fronts: money in order to keep itself afloat and" ... that first one is NOT optional. If that first one is not a prerequisite to having the factory than that factory (or company, or ...) is a net loss for the economy, society, for the world as a whole. You seem to imply it is tenable for a society to have most or all companies operate under such conditions, and of course it is not.

That is of course the alleged problem with communism. Profit in itself is not a necessity, but having profit >=0 over the long run IS a necessity (but obviously for company stability having a decent positive profit most years is very much not optional, and any exceptions must be made for investment purposes, not for any other reason). Otherwise, colloquially, you're "eating your seed grain".

That is the problem, right there. Communist economists see communism as a system that can work because people would still generate profit. People, even communist activists themselves, see communism as a system that can deny the real world. And under those circumstances, of course communism fails. Under a communist system as understood in economics departments, profit would still be an existential necessity for any company.

So if avoiding profit and "instead get X" is why you're a communist, stop right there. That's not communism, that's fantasy. No matter what X is. Stop defending anything remotely like that as an advantage of a communist system, because it is not. The real world need for more valuable output than input from any long-term process, applies just as much to communism as to capitalism, mercantilism, ...

>Profit is (the monetary value of) the benefit to society of the product being produced.

No. Monetary value is not perfect measure of utility, because market demand is weighted by wealth.

A luxury yacht for one individual clearly provides nowhere near as much utility to them as an equivalently priced quantity of food would provide to a bunch of homeless people, but the market prices it as such because the individual is richer. If we could magically swap the yacht for the food, everything else being the same, society would be better off as a result.

We allow this inequality of demand because it is what drives the supply side towards efficiency, and for the most part I think this is a reasonable compromise.

But we should not confuse profit with utility.

Again you're confusing some arbitrary ideological measure with utility. Social justice in this case.

Firstly profits of 5% of revenue are considered high, on average. That's what that yacht is paid out of, and that means that feeding many homeless with it wouldn't work in practice.

Second luxury articles provide firms with the rewards of motivation of their employees. Everyone in Silicon Valley keeps reminding us how that's the lifeblood of every company, and while I disagree with that, it's obviously useful, both to that firm and to society. So the yacht has more utility than you give it credit for.

> you're confusing some arbitrary ideological measure

Well I'm not using a well defined measure of utility here, but I thought it was fairly non-controversial to say that, at least in immediate terms, food for many people creates more utility than a yacht for one person.

That they're homeless isn't the point, and I should have left out that rehetoric. The point is just that they're less able to demand the food than the rich person is the yacht, despite it providing them more utility.

> luxury articles provide firms with the rewards of motivation

Yes, I said that. Inequality is what drives the supply side, and I agree that this may lead to better outcomes overall, but my point is that it complicates the process, and detaches money from being a raw measure of utility.

The possibility of a yacht may encourage someone to produce food more efficiently, but this is a lot harder to measure. Maybe the level of inequality doesn't matter that much as long as people perceive higher social status? Maybe the inequality reduces opportunities for many potential innovators, destroying more efficiency than it encourages? Or maybe the lack of security discourages people from taking risks even if they have opportunities?

I'm not asserting any of these ideas, just pointing out factors that confound measuring the utility created by inequality.

Cosma Shalizi deals very well with Cockshott's arguments on his blog: http://bactra.org/weblog/919.html

> inherent limitations of central planning

I wonder about those. I have this thought on the back of my head - now that we have ubiquitous light-speed communication and a big surplus of computing power, couldn't doing central planning via algorithms and automated systems offset some of the "inherent limitations" you mention?

(Honest question, I'm not advocating for communist revolution or anything; just looking for viable alternatives to organizing economy by recursive zero-sum games.)

Your line of thinking, though (as you noted) easily misconstrued by ideologists, seems quite reasonable and interesting.

I would guess that current AI tech is many orders of magnitude away, competency-wise, from being able to improve on the efficiency and agility of loosely connected networks of generally autonomous humans.

Even so, ignoring such technical limitations, the issues of control and individual agency are incredibly thorny. How are preferences aggregated? And how does a completely centralized system continually update itself to best serve all participants? Perhaps the competing AI systems can campaign every 4 years :)

Perhaps some sort of AI-human hybrid governmental system could offer a more modest path forwards. We are arguably already beginning to take first steps in that direction.

>the failure of the Soviet Union had more to do with the inherent limitations of central planning than Marxist communism

Between 1917 and 1950 they grew at a staggering pace. From agricultural backwater to first space power. That isn't an economic failure in any way.

After the 1950s they tried to re-gear the economy to producing things like fridges and, of course, for consumer items it wasn't nearly as effective.

In the end the thing that undid the Soviet project was the idealism of its president (Gorbachev) when faced with the results of his authoritarian predecessors. It wasn't really an economic failure.

>by attempting to refine the designs of failed communist states risks going back on the same path

If we attribute Stalin to a failure of communism surely we have to also attribute Hitler to a failure of capitalism?

Or we could accept that both analyses are stupid and shallow.

>Capitalism lends itself more towards authoritarianism

I think economic systems are orthogonal to political systems.

> Between 1917 and 1950 they grew at a staggering pace. From agricultural backwater to first space power. That isn't an economic failure in any way. > If we attribute Stalin to a failure of communism surely we have to also attribute Hitler to a failure of capitalism?

I agree with everything you said but this seems ironically contradictory...

> I think economic systems are orthogonal to political systems.

Not entirely orthogonal. But yeah, HN seems to think communism is inherently authoritarian.

Maybe that's because for many people, the belief that communism=authoritarianism was propaganda, spoon-fed at an early age and whipped up by the government at regular intervals to keep people afraid of the other and from questioning their present authority.

Same goes for terrorism these days. "If you're not with us you're against us," was the phrase I believe Bush the junior liked to tell us.

The engineers that drew up the Tsar's plans for industrialization implemented them under Communism. There is nothing surprising about that.

Likewise, it is predictable that a centrally planned economy would be able to develop industrial goods for industrial needs, but fail at producing consumer goods, which ultimately catalyzed far more economic growth in capitalist countries, both because of the market segmentation that a central plan could not predict or accommodate as well as a free market, and also because the incentives for the creator and access to the means of the production (primarily startup capital) were easier to come by in capitalist economies.

I think your comparison with Hitler is lacking in depth, unless it was meant to be a dig at my comment, which I believe I have rebutted.

I fundamentally disagree with your final statement. The accumulation of physical resources and political power is and will always be intertwined. If you can name one example in all of human history (from agriculturalization onwards), whereupon the political system did not depend on the economic system and the economic system did not depend on the political system, then I will concede my point. Until then, I find your argument lacking.

I strongly disagree. But I think i understand where you're coming from, because instead of 'alternatives' the answer is to stop doing many of our western liberal behaviors.

The alternative to a campaign of drone warfare is to not do the campaign.

The alternative to regime change and overthrow of democratically elected governments is to treat the nation as a sovereign nation, and not overthrow their government.

The alternative to concentrated wealth and monopolists is to split up the monopoly, and make do with smaller 'less efficient' companies.

You have actually illustrated 90% of the problem - none of the the above represents liberal behaviour but rather the very opposite. Liberal fight such behaviour, these things happen DESPITE OF liberalism. You have just validate my post.

Depends on your definition of 'liberalism'.

Classical liberalism was synonymous with libertarianism, minarchy, etc.

The modern colloquial usage is closer to meaning left-wing statism (as distinguished from 'conservative' or right-wing statism).

Please replace "modern colloquial" with "USA". Outside your country "liberalism" is not ambiguous at all.

Not doing things has consequences too. Choosing not to oppose Assad in Syria is undeniably bad for somebody. This is precisely the purpose of government, to decide what to do or not to do.

Oh yes. The genius of totalitarianism and theocracy and similar is to promise nothing but suffering and sacrifice. That way they can always deliver.

Yes we do.

It's just those who have benefited from this arrangement the most happen to also control the relationships that power mass media, which is then used to undermine alternative solutions as "racist", "sexist" and "evil" with no evidence whatsoever and immediately engage in mob swarming and plebeian intimidation.

For example: Western Liberalism absolutely requires cheap brown people. (And that deep reliance ABSOLUTELY makes supporters of Western liberalism completely racist) If you make cheap brown people as expensive as Western natives, why do you need cheap brown people? And if you have "good-enough" AI, why do you need either?

This is another criticism, not an alternative proposal.

Please give an alternative proposal.

Raise the minimum wage to $20/hour.

Watch as "serious economists" lie about:

* All of the jobs that will actually not disappear.

* All of the prices that will actually not rise (by much).

And try really really hard to pretend that:

* Raising the minimum wage doesn't channel profits into the pockets of workers.

What surprises me isn't that they lie. What surprises me is that people continue to believe them.

Out of curiosity, what do you suppose are the long-term effects of raising minimum wage?

If you were a landlord managing an apartment building, how much do you charge for a unit? If all of your tenants suddenly make twice as much money as they did, how long before you double their rent?

If a McDonalds needs to pay all of its employees twice as much money, how long before they double their food prices to make up the difference?

I feel like the working poor in this country get a terrible deal in this world - we definitely need to make conditions better. But does raising minimum wage actually do that in the long run? Or does it just increase inflation and destroy any savings the poor might have?

> If you were a landlord managing an apartment building, how much do you charge for a unit? If all of your tenants suddenly make twice as much money as they did, how long before you double their rent?

Remember, your tenants are now able to move to gentrified areas, their wages allow that. Some might want to get a mortgage for a house they could not dream of previously. So now your apartments will have to compete with much wider selection of property. You'll raise prices definitely, but not as much as you would think, and you'll spend most of the difference doing renovations and spending on security.

It also assumed increasing minimum wage would increase everyone wage. It's not going to boost a retired persons income or a CEO's pay for example.

>Out of curiosity, what do you suppose are the long-term effects of raising minimum wage?

* An increase in inflation but nowhere near enough to offset the rise in wages at the lower end.

* An increase in growth as the money multiplier effect kicks in.

* No real change in employment.

* Share prices fall and lowered earnings projections for classes of business that rely on minimum waged labor.

* As a sort of general guide, look at Australia.

>If you were a landlord managing an apartment building, how much do you charge for a unit? If all of your tenants suddenly make twice as much money as they did, how long before you double their rent?

It depends. This does not happen in a vacuum. If there are a lot of apartments coming on the market at the same time rent could stay the same or even go down.

Every business is subject to competition which would moderate the effect of inflation and tons of businesses that manufacture often respond to an increase in demand by raising production rather than prices (e.g. car manufacturing).

If it went up to $20 I'd project something like 4% inflation.

>If a McDonalds needs to pay all of its employees twice as much money, how long before they double their food prices to make up the difference?

If you want to see what happens to McDonalds, look at Australia:

http://uk.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-in-australia-vs-amer...

They A) raised the prices, B) raise the quality, C) actually kept the big mac price more or less the same, C) are facing competition from nicer restaurants (people have more disposable income and use it in restaurants other than el cheapo mcdonalds).

>I feel like the working poor in this country get a terrible deal in this world - we definitely need to make conditions better. But does raising minimum wage actually do that in the long run?

Yes.

>Or does it just increase inflation and destroy any savings the poor might have?

The poor have debts, not savings. Demand pull inflation caused by increased wages is just about the best possible outcome for them, but it is HORRIBLE for the rich and the rich have a very well oiled propaganda machine. Hence the "why don't you propose solutions" crowd and the downvotes on actual solutions ^^.

Coincidentally, housing prices (buy/rent) are income-elastic and one of the criticisms of a blanket UBI, not just minimum wage.

Did anyone compile a list of ways to handle this problem? I'm all for UBI, but this feels like a show-stopper, and I don't know of any workaround.

The market will solve it if the number of housing units is large enough compared to the number of families, provided no one vendor owns too large a fraction of them.

It seems pretty wasteful, though.

Not that I know of. Traditionally it has been handled by attaching spending restrictions to the income assistance - e.g. food stamps, medicare, unemployment, student loans, etc.

A significant rise of the minimum wage would rapidly accelerate the ongoing process of automation making people unemployable.

Already there are swaths of jobs that could be done better by machines but currently it's cheaper to hire a "cheap brown person" as the parent post says by outsourcing it. For example, the manufacture of clothing and footwear which currently employs many millions of people worldwide, mostly in SE Asia. As soon as rising wages pass that barrier and companies pony up for the required capital investments these jobs are never coming back.

There will always be more desires for new jobs/tasks that could be done - but the market price for them will be below the minimum wage, so they will happen only as hobbies.

>There will always be more desires for new jobs/tasks that could be done - but the market price for them will be below the minimum wage

That's a brave and entirely unsourced claim.

Given that this never happened in the past (e.g when almost the entire workforce was automated out of farm work), why are you so confident it will happen in the future?

>Raise the minimum wage to $20/hour. Watch as "serious economists" lie

appears a bit of a strawman argument. Googling "$20 minimum wage" the only thing on page one is an article explaining the obvious that people would lose jobs if you did. http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/02/20/why-shouldnt-we...

>explaining the obvious that people would lose jobs

That is neither obvious nor is it true. It is the opposite of what is observed experimentally. When the effect of minimum wage hikes is measured across state borders employment remains static.

> Raise the minimum wage to $20/hour.

I don't know how you came to the conclusion of western liberalism being against raising the minimum wage when it's been a core tenet of their platforms for over a decade now.

But to $20 an hour is something neither liberal nor conservative has EVER advocated for as until there is a public uproar for it, both will always side with corporate interests.

That said, your proposition is an alternative solution that I have never heard anyone of actual influence from either side of the political spectrum (outside of Sanders) ever bring up.

In direct inflation terms the minimum wage was ~10.50 / hour in 1968 or around the current minimum wage in France. Though as a percentage of the economy it was more than 20$/hour. Thus, it's not quite as clear cut as you are suggesting.

PS: Inflation is not really a single number as some but not all things end up costing less to produce over time. In other words, A may get more expensive while B becomes less expensive. Which makes long term inflation calculations more complicated.

Despite the fact that political language in the United States confuses this, 'Western Liberalism' is not the same thing as 'Progressivism'. Western Liberalism is about liberal democracy combined with free-ish markets. This can come with a minimum wage, or it might not. It encompasses the vast majority of the political landscape in most Western countries and everyone from American conservatives and to British labour fall under its domain.

I don't quite believe I'm hearing somebody say "aside from one of the 3 Presidential candidates who were all in the news constantly, nobody said this so nobody has EVER advocated for it".

The fact that the corporatist extremists ("moderates" like Obama and Clinton) squeeze this kind of idea from the public discourse is exactly what led to declining incomes which in turn is what made people furious enough to vote for Trump.

How, exactly, does Western liberalism absolutely require cheap brown people?

It doesn't. Western liberalism has, at times, relied on cheap white people, too.

But the need for unskilled labor has dropped precipitously, while demand for skilled labor has spiked. See, for example, the IT industry's need for "cheap brown people" (from India, Pakistan, and elsewhere in Asia). They're only marginally cheaper than white citizen labor, and a lot more expensive than unskilled labor. This has been offset some by outsourcing, so the labor can have a lower cost of living in their native country, but still.

Brown labor is always, always an act of desperation. A racist society would rather not have brown people at all, and only employs them if whites cannot or will not do the job.

"the need for unskilled labor has dropped precipitously"

here, the need for unskilled labor has dropped precipitously here

That's only because unskilled labor has become much more expensive here (unions, safety regulations, overtime, etc).

No, the need has gone away. Take, for example, moving a few tons of concrete rubble a couple hundred feet. The way it used to be done was to have a group of men hammering it into movable chunks, and another group of men carrying the chunks by hand. Now, you just use a Bobcat. One man can do the work of twenty.

Any job that requires a lot of muscle and not much brain has been more or less wiped out. That's a lot of jobs.

That's only true where the cost of labor is too high. Go visit a construction site in India and you'll see a lot of tasks done the way you've described above.

Every single thing you touched (And every single thing connected to what you touched) to type that statement was made overseas.

Welcome to the international system of currency and labor arbitrage, a core prerequisite for any democratic experiment. Democracy has ALWAYS and WILL always require slaves.

To me, I think you are objecting to capitalism more than democracy. That certainly chases labor arbitrage however I do think its a poor mischaracterization to attribute labor arbitrage to slavery. That doesn't mean arbitrarily small amounts of compensation don't effectively become slavery, but instead that pareto optimality is not the only way to prevent slavery.

Trade which is popular these days is not the same as slavery which is thankfully rare. The Chinese who make much of the stuff have done pretty well over the last few decades.

You are conflating economic neoliberalism (which is neither new nor contemporarily liberal) with social liberalism. They are not the same and nobody is pretending that they are.

I still fail to see your connection:

1: Slaves

2: Democracy

3: ????

4: Profit(?)

Could you explain with links or examples how exactly slavery (or economic peonage, depending on your definition), is required to maintain a democracy?

> You are conflating economic neoliberalism with social liberalism.

I agree it appears I'm making this conflation. But

> nobody is pretending that they are:

Is not an honest statement. Any attempt to make cheap brown labor more expensive through legislation (See the Trump protests) or even by IMPROVING their quality of life (See gentrification) is instantly fought off as racist. The powers that be have deeply merged international currency flow with Western liberal morality after the 1940s and use their sacred cows as hostages to stifle any threats to their power.

Gentrification pushes low income people out of their communities by increasing the costs of living there beyond their capacity to absorb those costs. It is also not inherently racist (as it affects anyone who is low income), but is one mechanism through which racial inequities are exacerbated in our country.

>Is not an honest statement. Any attempt to make cheap brown labor more expensive through legislation (See the Trump protests) or even by IMPROVING their quality of life (See gentrification) is instantly fought off as racist.

For the third time, I ask for a specific example. A link. Something. Otherwise I think you are either trolling or positing biased statements that are not backed up by facts.

>Coincidentally those who criticize it never offer alternative realistic solutions.

The choice to depict, say, Sanders' proposals as unrealistic by straw manning them was a deliberate political attack:

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2016/01/22/What-Libera...

Unfortunately the average Democrat primary voter didn't dig into the substance of the attack well enough to realize that it was essentially bullshit. They simply believed Krugman's lies.

The voters wanted a change from the status quo.

And that is why Trump is now your president.

A similar dynamic is now occurring in the UK. Corbyn's ideas (e.g. rail nationalization/pay caps) are routinely depicted as unrealistic. If people continue to believe those lies, the far right will be seen instead as the 'viable' alternative.

The same kinds of economists who declare pay caps unrealistic and are weirdly enough absolutely blind to unsustainable build ups of debt causing financial crises but pretend that magic robots are about to put 80% of us out of work in the next ten years. That's "realistic" I suppose.

Rail nationalization again? Britain has gone back and forth on that since the 1940s.[1][2][3] It didn't help. Currently, trains are mostly private and track is mostly Government-owned, which sort of works.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railtrack [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Rail

It sort of works at 3x the price you pay in Western Europe.

Of course, I don't think people want to return to the period just before privatization either when the rail network was deliberately starved of investment in order to make privatization appear more appealing.

Nonetheless, the majority of the public support this idea. The Telegraph literally called the majority of the public communists for doing so.