• for: meme - business - socialize costs / privatize benefits

• meme: business and industry

  • socialize costs / privatize benefits

If we all take action to do these things collectively, then it isn't a "tax" on any individual or corporation.

A very apt description of Trump's life philosophy. Also a broad perspective at how many Republicans and Libertarians seem to view the world economically: privatizing profits and socializing losses.

We need better ways of making valuations and assessing risk so that these sorts of dangerous debt can't be passed along.

These sorts of sales should have long term baggage clauses built into them to prevent government "suckers". If they fail within x number of years, the original owners and their investors are held liable for them.

An intriguing thesis.

Too often we trade away others' freedom(s) for small benefits to ourselves. This pattern has got to stop. The system should be closed in such a manner that the small trade-offs are balanced out across all of society.

Cory Doctorow also highlights the recent Texas abortion law which targets abortion providers. Rich Republicans who have backed this law will still have the power and flexibility to drive or fly to another state for their abortions when desired. There are no consequences for them because they're not in a closed system. If abortions were illegal everywhere and anyone getting one were to be prosecuted regardless of where they got their abortion, then the system would be more "closed" and without loopholes they could use. As a result, laws like this would never be passed because they would apply equally to those who were making them. Legislators and judges should think more about walking a mile (or a lifetime) in another person's shoes more often.

For lack of a better term let's use the idea of "political calculus" to describe this. Calculus is the mathematical study of small changes. So a small change to an individual isn't a big thing, but in the aggregate it can have profound and destructive effects on large swaths of the people.

In large part, this is how institutionalized and structural racism flourishes. We take small bites of powerless individuals which in aggregate causes far more harm.

This is all closely related to the idea of "privatizing profits and socializing losses".

How does this happen?

Is it the idea of "personal responsibility" and "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" philosophy combined with lack of any actual support and/or education?

There has to be a better phrase or word to define the perverse sort of philosophy espoused by many in the Republican party about this sort of "personal responsibility".

It feels somewhat akin to the idea of privatize profits and socialize the losses. The social loss is definitely one that is pushed off onto the individual, but who's profiting? Is it really so expensive to fix this problem? Isn't the loss to society and public health akin to the Million Dollar Murray problem?

Wouldn't each individual's responsibility be better tied to the collective good as well as their own outcomes? How can the two be bound together to improve outcomes for everyone all around?

Joshua Weitz. (2021, April 7). The same approaches that work against SARS-CoV-2 work against variants like B.1.1.7: Mask Avoid indoor gatherings Socialize outdoors And, reinforces the need to continue to scale-up vaccine administration to all 16+. [Tweet]. @joshuasweitz. https://twitter.com/joshuasweitz/status/1379820197696180233

Economic recovery for the masses took ages while the economic recovery for the wealthier was nearly instantanous.

What is the relationship to the recession with the rise of the Tea Party?

Will the pandemic recession do better since there seems to be more focus on the lower classes than the upper? The upper classes (and certainly the billionaires) apparently did incredibly well.

The 2008 recession was a major hit to middle-class America and another bail out for the upper classes.

This seems a solid microcosm of the idea of of privatizing profits and socializing the losses.

It also fits at the corporate level where a CEO who makes a horrible decision can wreck a company, but the low level blue collar worker or even low level white collar worker who steals hand tools or office supplies faces much larger consequences.

It's much harder to and more complicated to hold power to account, but we're obviously failing miserably at it in American society. How might we incrementally improve this situation. We desperately need it.

Humanitarianism and international engagement are definitely important, but their value is often made invisible to "Real America" or "middle America".

How can this value be made more apparent? How could we account for it to make it easier to see?

The issue is compounded when large corporations receive massive bailouts as it's an additional cost weighing down the system. Would humanitarianism and international engagement be easier to uphold if we left off corporate costs? Do most of the value of humanitarianism and international engagement redound to corporations as an additional value primarily to them rather than everyday people? Is their perceived problem that they're another method of privatizing profits to major corporations and elites and socializing the losses to the average person?

A solid question.

Perhaps less mysterious when gauged against the extreme financialization of our economy since the 1970's.

Are these people primarily propping up our classist structures to the lack of all else?

What could be done to re-regulate things back into some semblance of balance?

How much of the financialization is strip mining the lower classes or even middle classes of their earnings and retirements in progressively more vicious economic downturns that get bailed out by the populace?

Would allowing companies that are "too large to fail" help right the system and push more wealth back down to the lower classes?

This same thing is being seen in the U.S. Post Office now too. Underfund it into failure rather than provide a public good.

Capitalism definitely hasn't solved the issue, and certainly without government regulation. See also the last mile problem for internet service, telephone service, and cable service.

UPS and FedEx apparently rely on the USPS for last mile delivery in remote areas. (Source for this?)

The poor and the remote are inordinately effected in almost all these cases. What other things do these examples have in common? How can we compare and contrast the public service/government versions with the private capitalistic ones to make the issues more apparent. Which might be the better solution: capitalism with tight government regulation to ensure service at the low end or a government monopoly of the area? or something in between?

Quote from Daniel Markovitz

This does raise the point of whether or not some of the things elites are doing is actually good or productive for society. Many are only working at privatizing profits and socializing losses which can be phenomenally caustic to society as well.

Apparently lots of reading to catch up on here.

I definitely like the idea of starting with the commons and working backwards, not only with respect to data, but with respect to most natural resources. This should be the primary goal of governments and the goal should be to prevent private individuals and corporations from privatizing profits and socializing the losses.

Think of an individual organism in analogy to a country or even personkind. What do we call a group of cells that grows without check and consumes all the resources? (A cancer). The organism needs each cell and group of cells to work together for the common good. We can't have a group of cis-gender white men aggregating all the power and resources for themselves at the cost of the rest otherwise they're just a cancer on humanity.

And even with the ban, we can find dumped barrels nearly 60 years later which become problematic: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/us/ddt-barrels-california.html

This example underlines that as a society we need better collective responses to many things which not only improves the lives individuals, but of society as a whole.

A rising tide lifts all boats should be a government mantra rather than the more typical libertarian or republican responses of each person on their own. Without society and cohesion, neither individuals nor corporations can succeed, so let them carry more of the share that's due rather than externalizing all the costs.

This is another great example of companies attempting to privatize profits and socialize the losses, or in this case pass along the losses and lost productivity to their employees (or as described here their independent contractors).

Why can't they do some of the hard "technology" work and solve the problem of helping their workers become dramatically more productive?

Too often corporations use the idea that the workplace is a "family", but when times get tough, we don't abandon our families the same way that corporations will summarily fire their employees to try to survive themselves without any real thought about their supposed "family members".

Harper, Craig A., and Darren Rhodes. ‘Ideological Responses to the Breaking of COVID-19 Social Distancing Recommendations’, 19 August 2020. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkqj6.

Harper, Craig A., and Darren Rhodes. ‘Ideological Responses to the Breaking of COVID-19 Social Distancing Recommendations’, 19 August 2020. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkqj6.

Harper, Craig A., and Darren Rhodes. ‘Ideological Responses to the Breaking of COVID-19 Social Distancing Recommendations’, 19 August 2020. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkqj6.

Hamilton, J. L., Nesi, J., & Choukas-Bradley, S. (2020, April 29). Teens and social media during the COVID-19 pandemic: Staying socially connected while physically distant. Retrieved from psyarxiv.com/5stx4

Use in socialize-finance talk