The Sinister Case for Conservatism
An economy either has forced labor or not and any force at all throws some segment of the population under the bus.
America has many forms of force including:
- Union busting led by lack of protections and federal reserve interventions
- Massive financial barriers to entry on higher education
- Massive health care costs for the jobless
- Massive housing costs and frequent refusal to allow remote work even when it is as or more productive
- 5 day work weeks even when 4 day is proven better for everyone including employers — this artificially creates a pool of unemployed
- Incredibly regressive taxes where the rich pay much less — this makes workers unable to save and so reduces employment flexibility
- Inheritance taxes set low enough to create a caste system
- Legal immigration levels that require tremendous competition for most good jobs
- Encouraging monopolies and preventing small or individual business alternative employment
- Labor restrictions on many credentialed professions backed by law
- Lack of transportation infrastructure — this is again a type of regressive expense that only affects lower classes
- Billionaire owned media outlets less likely to disseminate accurate economic information — tends to lionize the billionaire owners or in case of NYT very conservative views matching old money owner family
- Military / CIA intervention in countries trying less strict systems
The only moral use of forced labor would be if needs like food or procreation were in jeopardy and even then volunteer has to be tried first. Using force for first world perks is immoral.
So in the resulting immoral musical chairs one is justified attacking others with pseudo science like meritocracy, race, gender, class, etc.
Once force is used at all then its use is hard to constrain. Inequality makes elites have more time, money, and influence. So they are able to manipulate the use of force to create greater inequality.
Plus productivity technology can become a boot on the lower class neck — less work for them, less bargaining power, even in a world that should be better off.
The conservative argument assumes that the haves are better off on average when force is used. That avoiding the possibility of doing some dirty work or losing some privileges is worth any level of rat race sacrifice.
Rebuttal of the case for conservatism
Conservatives always employ wildly more force than justified by the greater good of any large segment of society.
Universal basic income, UBI, is the obvious way out of using force but experimentation with a moral economic framework is anemic.
However mitigating any of this requires pausing the immoral musical chairs long enough to restore some sanity. At a minimum that means stopping worshiping the winners of a winner take all economy.
Its easy enough to understand that everyone going to a single local restaurant would be a disaster — all the other restaurants would go out of business. Somehow this sense of disaster fails to kick in for pouring unlimited resources into a billionaire’s brand.
Rebutting conservatism is less about logic and more about stopping a religion. If monopolies and billionaires are good then poor people are bad. No matter how beloved the billionaire is, say Taylor Swift, the end result of their existence is poverty, pain, and ever increasing forced labor.
That doesn’t mean that society has to give up on hearing a Taylor Swift sing — just on compensating her with over a billion dollars. If we want to limit the pain of forced labor then we start by limiting how much money a person can have.
Here conservatives will invariably say that if we adopt Limitarianism then innovation will stop. That’s ridiculous though because the billionaires don’t innovate anything (even Taylor Swift). Most of the billionaires appeal comes from being rather ordinary people who have dominated the pay out of large collaborations —that could be me think the worshipers.
For this reason scientists, researchers, and even song writers who actually innovate rarely see any out sized rewards. The system isn’t setup to accurately reward them that way because it’s not necessary — meritocracy is pseudo scientific nonsense used to justify forced labor. Meritocracy is as made up a construct as race is.
Max Martin and Shellback were crucial in helping create Swifty phenomena with songs like “Shake It Off” and “Blank Space”, but neither they nor the army of other writers, designers, dancers, etc. that Swift employees are billionaires. Few Swifties dream of becoming Shellback so giving him the god treatment is not required.
If popular sentiment truly turned against the billionaires then some limited form of UBI would be in place overnight. The use of force would decrease to a level where, though bad, it doesn’t threaten a fascist end of civilization.
Why did the love affair with billionaires start?
This self insert form of big man worship was not always the American way. The robber barons were not popular and men like Carnegie spent much of their fortune rehabilitating their reputation with philanthropy. This was philanthropy that, instead of staying squirreled away in sketchy foundations, built things that Americans could see and understand.
Robber baron Leland Stanford was elected governor and later senator of California. Governor Stanford did say:
To my mind it is clear, that the settlement among us of an inferior race is to be discouraged by every legitimate means. Asia, with her numberless millions, sends to our shores the dregs of her population. Large numbers of this class are already here; and, unless we do something early to check their immigration, the question, which of the two tides of immigration, meeting upon the shores of the Pacific, shall be turned back, will be forced upon our consideration, when far more difficult than now of disposal. There can be no doubt but that the presence among us of numbers of degraded and distinct people must exercise a deleterious influence upon the superior race, and to a certain extent, repel desirable immigration.
However the gilded age was unable to put trash like Stanford into the White House, where recently we have had both George W. Bush and Donald Trump. There was also no cult of Stanford.
Both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt are on the list of richest presidents as is John F. Kennedy. Not every rich person has adopted toxic meritocracy or supported tax policies designed to destroy the lower class.