Monday, October 10, 2016

What do people mean when they refer to Republicans and Democrats?

There are technically more than two political parties, but only two get the attention and the money to win elections from time to time.

The Democratic Party was founded by Thomas Jefferson. For a long time after the Civil War it was a predominantly Southern party, until Franklin D. Roosevelt refashioned it into a coalition of groups that benefited from measures to combat the Great Depression in the 1930s. That is when the Democrats first became liberal-leaning and favoring labor unions and worker rights, later civil rights.

The Republican Party was founded by Abraham Lincoln. It arose out of many of the issues that gave rise to the Civil War and was supported mostly by the Northeastern elites made rich by industrialization. For much of the second half of the 19th century it was a majority party thanks to that support (and the exclusion of many groups from voting). The FDR coalition, which fell apart in 1968, turned it into a minority party until the 1980s. The Grand Old Party, as it was called long ago, reversed its fortunes primarily by attracting the votes of white
Southerners who never forgave the Democratic Party for supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended legal segregation.

At present, the long-term demographics are working in favor of a future Democratic majority, as non-Hispanic whites are rapidly becoming a minority (Anglo-Saxon whites already are), but the plutocracy may find a way to corrupt the political process and keep the Republicans in play.


This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions and their subtexts are not mine.

Friday, October 07, 2016

What is socialism, in simple terms?

Socialism is an as yet unrealized system of social and economic organization by which the society as a whole controls, and equitably distributes, the yield of human work and machinery for the benefit of everyone. Socialists differ on how to get there.

Karl Marx, one of the first major exponents of socialism, offered an entirely theoretical scenario in which capitalism’s internal contradictions would lead it to a collapsing crisis. The working classes would then take control through a revolution and “dictate” a new social compact under which socioeconomic classes would eventually wither away. He died in the 1880s and did not see any of this come to fruition.

Marx had predicted that the revolution would occur in an industrially advanced capitalist country, he cited his native Germany several times. However, the first politically successful revolution to espouse Marx’s ideas occurred in backward Russia in 1917 under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, a polemicist who read Marx as justifying brutal terror and dictatorial rule by a self-appointed “vanguard.” The Marxist-Leninist regime, which in time came to call itself Communist, put together a vast repressive system to defend modest social and economic redistribution of wealth and power; its entirely state-owned economic institutions became internally corrupt and inefficient until Communism collapsed bloodlessly in 1991.

Meanwhile, in western Europe after World War II, the exhaustion of traditional unfettered capitalism and a shared poverty brought on by two vastly destructive wars allowed non-Communist parties aligned with the Socialist International (of which Marx himself had been a member) to eventually gain power in Britain, France, Sweden, the Low Countries and eventually Germany, Spain and Italy. All of these carefully avoided too explicit an identification with Marx, due to the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, but they managed to launch a variety of vast reforms that developed what was called “the welfare state.” This was a womb-to-tomb system of social insurance to protect workers from poverty, unemployment and their worst effects, without actually attempting to force the end of private enterprise.

In North America, Canada leans toward the European socialist model although no socialist party has ever won a governing majority. The model is roughly what socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders proposed for the United States in the 2016 presidential election campaign.


This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions in italics and their subtexts are not mine.

Friday, September 23, 2016

Do long-term unemployed job seekers deserve what happens to them?

Do long-term unemployed job seekers deserve any of the adverse economic consequences which they may receive?
For example, do they deserve bankruptcy, homelessness and so on?


Let's set aside the philosophical question of deserving. I would ask instead: is what happens to them the consequence of their actions? My answer is no.

Long-term unemployment is defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as 27 weeks (a bit more than 6 months) out of work involuntarily.
Who are these people? One big group is workers over 55, known as "older workers"; although it is illegal to discriminate against anyone over 40, the market place is not kind to older workers as a rule. They are more expensive to hire because they know the score and have some experience. They are not blank slates and cannot be molded to do whatever an employer wants. And other reasons.

Another large group is much younger people with little training or skills. You might say they should have stayed in school or gone to college, but in reality the deal you're dealt has a lot more to do with what I jokingly call the family you chose to be born in. If you were born poor in the United States, on average, only your children's children's children's children have a chance of becoming rich. That has been studied and demonstrated.

Lastly, there is a well-known labor market bias against LTUs: employers wonder why no one hired someone who has been looking for a job for six months or more. "Is there something they knew about this person that I am not seeing?" (Many stay unemployed as long as two years.)



This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions in italics and their subtexts are not mine.