Nihilianth
Illuminator
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2011
- Messages
- 3,816
OH! I also would like to make one other argument against this madness:
Money circulation, and economic growth.
As I said in my initial essay on this topic, money, aka: "currency," is meant to FLOW THROUGHOUT the economy. Hence the word: "Currency." As in a "Current." Like blood flowing throughout the body, or a river flowing through the land, or even a current in the ocean that transports nutrients all across the entire breadth of the seas, or fresher air being transported around the globe from areas of high oxygen production. That's what a "current" does. "Currency" is a mass noun that refers to a nation's physical money that they produce and sanction to be used as legal tender for all transactions, and yes. It is meant to flow through the entire economy.
When blood in a human body clot in one or two areas, what happens? You become unhealthy, and your risk of death greatly increases. You will eventually die from blood clots.
Same thing with a nation's entire money supply. When it clots into the hands of a few individuals, economic collapse is inevitable. Revolutions are almost always started by the desperately poor with nothing to lose.
That was a recap of my first essay on this topic. Now for the meat of my secondary argument against this post by Trausti:
Money being spent and exchanging hands is a good thing. As clearly demonstrated above. Restaurants, movie theaters, retailers.... They all need capital in order to continue to operate and employ people. If only 1% of the population can afford to go out to eat or go to a theater or a sports game, guess what happens to all of these places?
They all go under. They go bankrupt. They shut their doors. That's what we ALL saw with all of our shopping malls. Well, anyone older than like, 35 at least, saw a slow dwindling of shoppers in all of the malls, until each retailer started closing one by one. As retailers went out of business, it harmed other retailers because there was less and less of a need for shoppers to continue going to the mall. Eventually, the shopping malls had to shutter their doors. Same thing with the movie theaters.
Wal-Mart and Amazon offered cheap and easy-to-shop stores as the middle class got financially squeezed by shrinking wages through inflation going up faster than wages, even as the top CEOs were continually raking in more and more record-breaking salaries.
So. Retailers cannot survive without a massive number of shoppers. They cannot be supported by just 1% of the population as shoppers. Afterall, a single billionaire individual can only practically wear a single set of clothes at a time. They can only eat so much food at a time. They can only watch a single movie at a time, and there are only 24 hours in a day. Empty seats in a movie theater is lost revenue. Just like with empty hotel rooms. They're perishable, and time can never be brought back. Once a seat is empty for the noon matinee viewing of the newest comic book movie on July 23rd, 2026, that's it. That seat for that movie at that date and time will never be able to be sold. (That's why matinees exist: To get butts in the seats for a movie at a time that is typically not very popular.)
Elon Musk can only watch one 2-and-a-half-hour movie at a time. He's just one individual. If none of his workers are being paid a proper livable wage, then none of them are going out to see movies. Elon Musk also can only spend so much money at a time as well as a single individual. He literally cannot possibly spend, even a week's worth of his salary on himself. It's all wasted capital that's sitting around, rotting. Not being put to use. He only invests so much of his generated salary and bonuses. Afterall, he DOES have cash in the bank. A whole hell of a lot of cash. Not every penny of his salary and bonuses are going to stocks and bonds. And even if it were, only a handful of other investors and top corporate leaders would benefit from it, for the bottom workers aren't making a living wage from whatever other companies Musk owns stock in.
Of course, there is also the Netflix affect that has harmed movie theaters. It isn't just all because of the lack of mass disposable income. But the fact that Netflix is overall cheaper than going to the movies all the time and cheaper than paying for cable television, and without the commercials; the lack of disposable income (people trying to save money on cheaper entertainment), is still a big part of it. People would definitely still go out to the movies to see the newest big blockbuster on a big screen with their friends and family and eat some yummy movie theater popcorn. And maybe go to dinner afterwards to talk about it over a meal that they otherwise wouldn't be able to create themselves and not having to do the dishes, if they did still have the pre-Reaganomics disposable income of the mid to late 20th century that the enormous productive middle class got to enjoy back then.
The reason the 1980s and 1990s was so nostalgic, because that the PEAK American economics. It was also a time of rapidly growing equality between the races and the sexes. Nobody cared about what religion you were, and religion stayed well clear out of government. The government was awash in cash. So were retailers and restaurants. The middle class was at its peak in both breadth and wealth, as the disparity in the wealth gap was at its historically all-time lowest. Money was flowing throughout the entire economy very efficiently. The combination of strong unions, with social safety nets, and democratic socialist policies from the FDR era, along with a free and open marketplace with privately-owned businesses worked extremely, breathtakingly, very well together. And the government was not racking up all of this debt. It was in the black more years than not. Poverty rates, and therefore, crime rates, were dropping right at the peak of the 1980s. It dropped all throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s.
Face it: The Republican Party, and the extreme right wing "news" entertainment channels like Fox News, Breitbart, and Newsmax; they all blew it. They have destroyed this country.
