Anti-Capitalist Sentiment (with some morality)

[a500lbgorilla]

Hong Kong, Singapore, America, Canada, Germany...

[wufwugy]

Hong Kong, Singapore, America, Canada, Germany...

This narrative which every modern country has adopted aside, let's think more critically about this.

Most serious economists claim the Federal Reserve caused the Great Recession. They also claim the Fed caused the Great Depression. The Fed itself about a decade ago apologized for having caused the Great Depression. The short of how this central bank caused these problems is that their policies deviated from stable monetary regimes.

AFAIK, the best estimate in political science for how socialism gained traction in the US was as a response to the Great Depression. The short of it is in that when society runs downhill, the populace gravitates towards centralized solutions. They seek government to solve the problems. The Great Depression ushered in a new era of US socialism, starting with the New Deal. The entitlement programs of a couple decades later are thought to be of the same mold. The Great Recession has shown the same type of circling of the wagons and declaring government the champion, the ACA being the biggest example. In between these two calamitous economies, we have an era of mild supply-side, anti-government reforms (very mild ones), and the data suggests they caused a boom greater than similar economies that did not reform.

So here we have a situation where the government creates a huge recession with its own incompetence. Then the populace gives the government more power to ward off the misdiagnosed symptoms in the future. But this new power doesn't have the intended effect. Instead it has a detrimental effect. Then the government creates another major recession, and the populace leaps back into the mode of giving government more power to "fix" the problem.

The narrative is wrong. Socialism is not adopted because it helps people. It's adopted because people think it helps them, when the reality is that macroeconomics operates on a scale that isn't perceived experientially. The market is so powerful that even when large sections of it are socialized and subsequently function horribly, our society is still getting better.

[a500lbgorilla]

Hong Kong, Singapore, America, Canada, Germany...

All of them capitalist in practice but with distinct social flavorings. All of them work.