At least they are doing their job and not letting the Overton window slide further toward fascism.

Apparently the right wing talkshows are complaining that the founding fathers wanted impeachment to be reserved for high crimes and misdemeanors rather than whatever it is Trump has done now.

I don’t get what that message is. “We think you’re really bad. See? There *are* consequences to your actions, Mr Trump, and you can be held to account! (Well, not really, because everyone knows this is leading to no conviction, so really it’s just a demonstration of how you can’t be held accountable! But still: we think you’re really bad!)”

Which I guess is just to say I don’t see how this whole thing doesn’t end up in incentivizing Trump to do even more bad stuff because it just demonstrates that no matter what he does nobody can stop him.

The more toxic you can make Trump's image, the more you can hopefully drive opportunists away from Trump and towards his replacement, the moderate Republican Biden.

Huh. Listened to a podcast which did really suggest that American slavery wasn't really profitable independently but was a highly government subsidized, rent-seeking venture. For instance, the Fugitive Slave Act was not much more than a Northern State subsidy to Southern States, forcing them to do the hard work of capturing and returning slaves. Interesting stuff.

Huh, strange. I wonder if that podcast relies on scholarship that is outdated? If I recall correctly (and if I was correctly informed to begin with), the historiography has differed over the years. Scholarship from several decades ago generally made the case that slavery was bad by arguing that it was unprofitable, while more recent scholarship makes the case that it was bad despite being enormously profitable — and that it laid the groundwork for the exploitative machine known as “American capitalism”.

Alternatively, what do Democrats do when Trump gets re-elected, after their president not only didn’t win the popular vote in 2016, but has been impeached? Talk about a crisis or legitimacy.

If subsistence farming is so terrible, why does industrial society keep inventing new ways to force people off their land? You have to be very rich in Canada or the US to legally do subsistence farming.



My understanding is that the profitability oscillated a fair amount. It was initially profitable independently, as British demand for raw cotton bubbled and it was a source of relatively inexpensive labor. After the British cotton bubble deflated, slavery became differently profitable due to finance. Investors speculated on slaves, and northern banks were making a fortune on loans for slave purchase.

Calling something a northern state subsidy to the slave owning States is oversimplifying a lot, because it assumes northerners weren’t profiting from slavery. They super duper were.

What you're referring to they call in the podcasts 'the new history of capitalism', which is a recent attempt by historians to discuss the economics of the Antebellum South. The podcast has a slew of economists and economic historians who are critical of the stance you mentioned. IIRC some of the arguments are that the method of collecting data is faulty, often double and quadruple counting figures in cotton production to arrive at the conclusion that 50% of the Antebellum American economy (north + south) was cotton. They give more modest figures at 5%. They also criticize these people for basically echoing the pro-slavery arguments of the age. The Southern politicians (funded naturally largely by plantations) argued that ending slavery would destroy the American economy. Which it clearly didn't, as it turns out the northern economy was far more robust and active than they thought. They go on to criticize these historians for neglecting the economic literature on this subject. They also question the ideological motives of the professors.

I am in no position to give commentary on this, I'm merely forwarding the stances.

I don't think impeachment would effect what other world leaders think of Trump, at least. I thought we agreed crisis was necessary to fix the American system? If this is the crisis, it's pretty minor.

Depends on which state, I suppose. New York, yeah probably profited. Ohio?

Yeah, I’m not looking forward to the complacency that would inevitably ensue if Trump were impeached.

If you abstract away the unique human cost of slavery (which as a rule I don’t recommend, but for the sake of this discussion) the corrupting influence of the relatively minor slave industry isn’t much different than the corrupting influence of the relatively minor telecommunications industry, the relatively minor oil industry, the relatively minor car industry, the relatively minor semiconductor industry, the relatively minor software industry, or the relatively minor insurance industry. It seems to me that a history of American capitalism is just finance sacrificing the rest of the country on the altars of a sequence of small but trendy industries. So far only one has caused a civil war. So far.

HP was still dumping toxic waste in Palo Alto after most of us were born. EPA be damned, the crackdown only came after the shiny wore off.

But I’m talking about the developing world.

How many of the 1.2 million people displaced by the Three Gorges Dam do you think were excited by the opportunity to join industrial society?

Getting close to ticking all of the boxes for why I hate discussing this "elevating people out of poverty" bull****.

You might not want to discuss the developed world, but it is absolutely relevant to scrutinize what happens under mature capitalism because that is the end point you're advocating for the developing world. Capitalism requires a secular labor surplus in order to function (in order to "elevate people out of poverty"). In other words, somebody in capitalism always has to take it up their keister, because otherwise markets get weird. This isn't true for subsistence farming.

So even if you believe capitalism by itself elevates people out of poverty (N.B. it doesn't, industrialization does, and industrialization does not require capitalism), it can only do so by throwing a smaller number down an even deeper pit. Maybe you think iPhones and air conditioning morally justify sacrificing people to actual abject poverty (vs. fake World Bank poverty, which doesn't impute incomes from subsistence farming) but I personally think there are more ethical ways of achieving the same outcome.

Interesting take I recently read on the whole Ukraine thing: apparently the story has been on the internet for a while, but Giuliani decided to "leak" it now as a distraction (probably from something worse that they don't want attention toward).

Alright well now Eversor has voiced his opinion.

In other news, apparently someone in the White House either accidentally or 'accidentally' emailed a copy of their media spin plan to Nancy Pelosi.

uh, what's that supposed to mean? No need to make this personal.

I mean, this is one of those posts where you've misrepresented my view or there is something else problematic in almost every line, but I'm not going to bother with the tedium of addressing all the mistakes (it's not worth anyone's time).



Okay, but you evidently don't want to discuss people who voluntary leave the circumstances of subsistence farming to pursue a better life in industrial societies. Subsistence farming and primitive economies are an easy thing to romanticize, but industrial society, despite its inequality, also produces the material security that enable individuals to escape exposure to basic threats to one's self-preservation and liberation from the most basic processes of natural necessity (effectively, what Hannah Arendt calls labor). I'm not trying to downplay the indignities and the violence of capitalism and of industrial society, I'm just arguing that the idea that at least everyone is fundamentally in the same boat in societies that are based on subsistence farming isn't worth much to those who actually live in those societies, and is a reason why many welcome the very thing you call "slavery."

And to that effect, it's notable that developed states provide welfare and social programs that protect against the hardships that befall those who suffer the most from the inevitable stratification of society under capitalism. You might object that those things aren't exactly "capitalist" at all, but that doesn't matter. Capitalist societies provide them. Do non-industrial societies that rely on subsistence farming? Healthcare in the United States is ****ed up, but at least you can see a doctor in the emergency room. What comparable recourse is there in societies based on subsistence farming? Life expectancy for those practicing subsistence farming is worse than for hunter-gatherers.



Of course industrialization and capitalism aren't the same thing (and, of course, it was never my contention that they were), but it's capitalism that has made industrialization in much of the developing world/integration of much of the developing world into the global economy possible, by enabling capital from developed countries to be invested in developing countries, by creating export markets for developed countries to sell natural resources and commodities, and by bringing corporations from the developed world there to exploit labor markets in developing countries, and so on.

ok I guess I’ll take your word

I don’t but not because it’s inconvenient, but because capitalism makes alternative lifestyles illegal so it is irrelevant whether people choose to do it or not. The choice has been made for them. The fact that some of them may still enjoy their current way of life is a temporary condition, wholly predicated solely on whether a capitalist has need of their land.

You are grossly misinformed about how economies that feature subsistence farming actually work and about the quality of life it is capable of providing. Subsistence farming requires surprisingly little land and much less total time investment than wage labor under industrial capitalism, leaving the people who live in such societies a lot of free time they can use to pursue other work (wage labor or more often uncompensated labor that doesn’t show up in GDP).

I am not romanticizing this; subsistence agriculture was advocated as a model for rural and suburban labourers (particularly miners) in the United States as late as mid-century as an effective means of cost-savings. If you are remote and you have the land, it is relatively trivial to grow as much food as you need. 1/10th of an acre of wheat is enough for you to eat a loaf of bread every day for the next year.

The problem with subsistence farming is that it requires land and it’s not compatible with city living, which effectively means factory workers can’t do it.

The opportunity cost for a developing world subsistence farmer isn’t a well-regulated first world job with health benefits and labor protections, it is a nano-apartment (dog cage covered in a blanket) working 20 hour days for a US-owned sweat shop that locks the doors from the outside installs suicide netting so people can’t take breaks.

At least until the middle income trap snaps shut and capitalists fail to allocate capital, like why people are killing themselves in the Midwest right now. Then people are right back to subsistence farming, assuming it’s not already illegal by then.

Capital allocation isn’t a solved problem, and the fact that rapacious capitalists are willing to exercise a foreign labor market arbitrage economy means exactly **** all for the long term prosperity of the people who live there.

Eh. I mean, I think we may disagree about what constitutes "subsistence farming". Or if we don't, instead, I'll submit that subsistence farming looks very different in a developed country than in a developing country.

I mean, what drove urbanization in the the 19th century (in the US, Europe and the Middle East, and likely elsewhere)? Here are two important factors: advances in medicine and agricultural technology.

First, before that point in history, farming households had as many children as they could as a hedge against the deaths of their several of their children to illnesses that were easily preventable with the rise of modern medicine.

Second, advances in agricultural technology that arose in the course of the latter half of the 19th century enabled 10x or even 100x efficiency, and gave those who had those technologies a decisive competitive advantage against those who didn't.

Together, those two factors meant that rural communities had larger populations than they could sustain: because modern medicine was readily available, children didn't die of preventable illnesses, and because of efficiencies in agriculture due to technology, there were fewer jobs available. There was, in other words, a surplus of labor in rural communities, at the precise moment when there was a rising demand for labor in cities due to industrialization. Hence, urbanization.

What am I getting at? Not that capitalism undermines ways of life based on subsistence farming, which of course is something that I just described. In other words, something close to what you were getting at when you said this:



I'll add, I don't feel like that's a point I need to concede, because I don't think it undermines my position. I'm not arguing that capitalism is some kind of moral force in the world.

No: what I'm getting at is that subsistence farming in the middle of the 20th century, when it was still possible to take advantage of modern technology and modern medicine, looks very different from subsistence farming when you can't. Many people in the developing world who practice subsistence farming are not practicing that type of subsistence farming. Their form of life is fundamentally unchanged from how people lived 500 or 1500 years ago, and just as arduous.



Of course. What's remarkable is that people in developing countries still choose to move to cities to have a chance at a better life, if not for themselves, for their children, and to escape what are effectively pre-modern conditions of life, despite the fact that it's absolute hell (just as it was for those in the 19th century who made similar decisions).

Maybe, maybe not. When the US was a developing country, US industrialization was largely funded by overseas (especially British) capital. And look at us now, baby! We kick everyones' asses in the Olympics.

It’s much less remarkable that people would “choose” absolute hell once you Occam’s razor off your assumption that it’s voluntary.

See also my first post on this subject, which you (speaking frankly) didn’t understand at all. People “chose” serfdom. But actually, no, they ****ing didn’t. They “chose” not to be starving beggars.

Don’t forget to fondle the balls.

Oops, I mean: what a pathetically narrow-minded, self-congratulatory coastal elite perspective on the development of the US economy. The parts of the US that weren’t high productivity in 1969 have been utterly hollowed out by labor market arbitrage to the point that their actual quality of life is on par with the developing nation subsistence farmers you know nothing about, but please oh please tell me all about how US capital allocation is great and actually owns.

**** like this is why trump won.

lol, cute. What you just said is the exact point i've been making all along. As I said in response to your original post, it's easy for you to make the claim that such people were (or are) surrendering their economic freedom. But many people who actually live as subsistence farmers in the developing world today are looking at their own life style and choosing to subject themselves to industrialization because that offers greater promise for the future than what they currently do. Working in a sweat shop is bad, but being a subsistence farmer is even worse. Evidently, they believe there's even more freedom in the former than the latter (in the sense that industrial society provides material goods that ensure basic security and self-preservation, such as when I brought up Arendt).

Oh yeah, that's exactly what I came across when I was reading a little about all this in the wake of the publishing of the NYT's 1619 project.

You’re right, I guess if they really liked subsistence farming so much, they would just find a new plot of affordable arable land to work after they got eminent domained to make way for an industrial project in exchange for a nano-apartment.

If black people didn’t want to be slabes, why didn’t they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps lol

Capitalism MUST be great, otherwise why would the US spend so much money on bombs to spread it???

Ahem

Oh boy. Jon's lost it.

Dude I don't want to have one of these big blow-upy slap fights right now. I was trying to make O'Leary's argument into something vaguely defensible, devil's advocate style. You don't have to make this personal.

Well fine, transpose what I’m saying onto O’Leary if you don’t want to own your own arguments.

China displaced 1.2 million people for an industrial project, many of which were subsistence workers perfectly happy to stay where they were. Those people went from having all of their biological needs met to comparatively miserable lives living in microcondos next to some of the most polluted water on earth. (I mentioned this before but you didn’t offer a response.)

This isn’t just about agency. Governments and investors are changing the conditions to make traditional lifestyles punitive. It is incredibly offensive to describe becoming a wage labor as voluntary. It’s about as voluntary as getting sexual consent at gunpoint.

I have been pretty careful to use language throughout our discussion to suggest that there are *cases* where it is voluntary, and that is it voluntary for many people. I've never suggested that it is always voluntary.

A math professor once told me that if you assume a false thing, you can prove anything to be true.

Perhaps in the old days, there were some people who sold themselves into slavery for kicks. Perhaps.

I mean, the idea that there are circumstances where it is appropriate to say it is voluntary isn't *that* absurd. Anecdotally, there are plenty in the generation of immigrants who came to North America in the late 19th/early 20th century who were eager to leave behind the traditional life of the shtetl (or whatever other impoverished material circumstances for other ethnic groups) to have the chance at a better life with greater material wealth.

Is it voluntary when a migrant makes the choice to escape gang violence, corrupt governments, and flailing economies in central or South American countries by making the arduous and dangerous journey to the United States, to pick strawberries in the fields in California for below minimum wage, because it still provides a higher quality of life than what he left? That's a philosophical question, I suppose. Yes, it's a choice made under duress. But how is that different from what you claim you were saying in your original post, and what I've been saying all along?

I could provide an answer for you, had i the slightest clue what you were saying other than a disjointed, breathless defence of labor exploitation.

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.